With the just-dated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, another Smurfs movie and Steven Spielberg’s The BFG all arriving within three months of each other, the summer of 2016 is looking like an unusually nostalgic one. Now, another familiar face from our childhood appears to be mounting a comeback around the same time, with Lionsgate’s announcement that it has dated a live-action Power Rangers movie for July 22nd, 2016.
The announcement puts Power Rangers on a direct collision course with Warner Bros.’ King Arthur, another potential series starter. Chances that one or both will move at some point are heightened by the fact that the fifth Bourne movie opens one week earlier, on July 15th, and the third Planet of the Apes hits one week later, on July 29th.
Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz, who previously scripted X-Men: First Class, are penning the script for Power Rangers, which is said to be a “complete re-envision[ing]” of the ’90s TV franchise, which spawned two feature films in 1995 and 1997. Haim Saban, Brian Casentini, Allison Shearmur and Roberto Orci are producing.
The franchise, which is currently airing its twenty-first season, Power Rangers Super Megaforce, on Nickelodeon, has featured a variety of characters and stories throughout its run. Traditionally, Power Rangers focuses on a group of teenagers who are infused with special powers and tasked with learning to work as a team in order to save the world from an evil enemy, though the screenwriters’ intentions to “re-envision” the property means we can only speculate as the premise of Lionsgate’s new take.
What do you think? Do you want to see a new Power Rangers movie, or should this franchise have been left alone?
