Since it was announced last October that I Am Not Okay With This and The End of the F***ing World‘s Jonathan Entwistle had been tasked with overseeing an entire Power Rangers shared universe for Hasbro and their newly-acquired feature film subsidiary Entertainment One, there’s been very little news surrounding the reboot.
If anything, the next feature-length outing for the titular team just got a little bit further away after Entwistle was announced to be replacing G.I. Joe: Retaliation‘s Jon M. Chu as the director and executive producer of Disney Plus’ Willow sequel series, which is set to start production in a matter of months.
That means that Power Rangers isn’t likely to gain much traction until the end of this year at the earliest, although we do know that it’ll be a time traveling adventure that features a trip to the 1990s, and is no doubt being positioned as a much more light-hearted and fun slice of escapism than Dean Israelite’s self-serious 2017 version, which drastically underperformed at the box office.
Time travel is a neat hook that can throw plenty of nostalgia into the mix without bearing down too heavily on the ultimate narrative outcome, and we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us the Transformers franchise was being rebooted long before it was confirmed – that most of the major past iterations of the Power Rangers will get a brief moment to shine. It’s unclear if it’ll be the original actors under the suits, but we’re told that it most likely will be. At least, for a lot of them.
Admittedly, there’ve been 22 different iterations of the characters so far from the original Mighty Morphin’ vintage to the most recent Dino Fury and trying to fit them all into the one movie would be an incredibly ambitious aim, but even the briefest of cameos from just some of the lineups would serve the purpose of delivering fan service while still making sense in the time travel context of Entwistle’s Power Rangers.
