The odds are good that Lionsgate/Saban’s Power Rangers – a movie reboot of the franchise, specifically the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV show – will be featured at the International Comic-Con in San Diego in July. That may explain the recent influx of news about the in-production film; including, the official announcement that award-winner Bryan Cranston will be playing the Rangers’ alien mentor Zordon in the movie, opposite Elizabeth Banks (The Hunger Games) as the trouble-making sorceress Rita Repulsa.
It’s possible a teaser trailer for Power Rangers will be unveiled at SDCC too; a trailer debut at the international geek convention would certainly kick the film’s marketing push up a notch, well ahead of its March 2017 theatrical release. For the time being, though, fans of the Power Rangers franchise will have to make due with a teaser poster centered around the young heroes from the movie: Jason (Dacre Montgomery), Kimberly (Naomi Scott), Billy (RJ Cyler), Trini (Becky G), and Zack (Ludi Lin).
The Power Rangers teaser poster, which you can check out below, was posted through the movie’s official Twitter account. It features the outlines of the Rangers (minus their “Morphin” gear), beneath a nighttime sky where a collection of stars make up the shape of the Power Rangers lightning logo. The Power Rangers Twitter account has also announced that those fans who re-Tweet the poster with the film’s tagline as #TogetherWeAreMore will have a chance to win a digitally-signed version of the poster.
The Power Rangers property lies in Lionsgate’s wheelhouse, in the sense that the studio has made similar young adult sci-fi/action franchises its speciality over the past 4-5 years – specifically, with The Hunger Games and Divergent. No surprise, Lionsgate studio executives hope that the 2017 Power Rangers reboot does well enough at the box office to follow in those YA series’ footsteps and sustain multiple sequels. Of course, whether or not that happens will depend in part on how Power Rangers fans take to the new versions of the MMPR crew – and whether or not general audiences turn out to see the film in large-enough numbers.
Fortunately, the Power Rangers‘ young cast is a talented one, and one imagines that seasoned veterans Cranston and Banks will be fun to watch too (and camp it up, in a good way), with their respective performances as the noble Zordon and dastardly Rita Repulsa. Meanwhile, behind the camera, Power Rangers director Dean Israelite showed potential with his breakout film Project Almanac: a found-footage adventure that, like Power Rangers, revolves around a group of teenagers who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. On the other hand, some people have reasonably expressed concerns that the Power Rangers movie will suffer from having too many cooks in the kitchen – seeing as it’s credited to no less than six different screenwriters.
NEXT: Rita Repulsa & the Green Ranger Theory
Saban’s Power Rangers opens in U.S. theaters on March 24th, 2017.
