BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Can 'Power Rangers' Become The Next 'Transformers'-Style Blockbuster Franchise?

This article is more than 8 years old.

Power Rangers Then And Now: B-Movie Kid Flicks Are The New A-Level Blockbusters:

Today is the 20th anniversary of the theatrical release of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie. This will not be a discussion of the film's artistic legacy, as I would argue it has none. It will barely be a discussion of its box office performance, as it didn't make much of an impact either way. It was cheap enough ($15 million) that its $66m worldwide haul qualified as a win. Back in 1995, the Power Rangers movie, released by 20th Century Fox in the heart of the July 4th holiday weekend, was something of a curiosity, a bit of kid-friendly counterprogramming against Judd Dredd and Apollo 13. It was noteworthy in that it took place during the run of the television show, a fact that still makes it stand out alongside the rare likes of The X-Files: Fight the Future and Batman: The Movie. It was a continuation/extension of the show's continuity and featured all of the main characters played by the same actors. But what makes Mighty Morphin Power Rangers stand out today is, in retrospect, how small of a deal it was.

It was a fantasy action movie pitched toward very young kids, and thus it had a relatively small budget, a relatively small profile, and eventually made a relatively small impact. 20 years later, we are on the verge of getting another Power Rangers movie, and this one is probably going to be a very big deal. What once was a distraction has become Hollywood's main event. Back in June of 1995, the television show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was in its second year of an unholy run that still continues in one spin-off after another to this day. The original show was arguably at the peak of its popularity. It had taken American television by storm, becoming something of a pint-sized sensation and incurring controversy for its easily-replicable fight scenes. That it was basically a reformatted version of a Japanese monster show with new sequences shot featured American actors as the would-be alter egos was of little consequence to its fans. The colorful costumes, the goofy and explosive fight scenes, and the gee-wiz heroism of its core cast was something that stood out, akin not to the "intended for kids, but enjoyable for adults" shows like AnimaniacsGargoyles, The Tick, or Batman: The Animated Series but rather a live-action Super Friends.

It is no secret that I am not a fan of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I was just old enough when the show premiered in 1993 to be rather fascinated by it in a trainwreck kind of way. In retrospect, I was about six years too old for it, and I imagine if I was a lot younger when it debuted I would share the nostalgia that some of you have for the show in its original incarnation. And it was only a matter of time before someone decided to take the property and turn it into a mega-budget live-action fantasy franchise. That time came last summer, when Lions Gate Entertainment announced that it would be producing and distributing a live-action Power Rangers movie. There isn't much known about the picture at this point, but you can bet it won't be a digression or small-scale counterprogramming. It will surely be attempting to be something akin to the next Transformers, a big-budget and big-scale action fantasy blockbuster tailored not to little kids but to all would-be moviegoing quadrants.

I'm not saying it will be a hyper-violent/hypersexual macho porn romp akin to the Transformers sequels, but it will likely be closer in content and tone to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. Speaking of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, part of what made Power Rangers such an attractive property is the ease in which it could be slipped into a standard "first team movie" screenplay structure. You basically take the scripts to G.I. Joe: The Rise of CobraX-Men, and Rise of the Guardians, change the names and places, and presto, you have a "new recruit discovers and joins the Power Rangers while learning about their history and helps them defeat an emerging threat" movie. It is a franchise with 20+ years of material to pull from, with the flexibility to not necessarily adhere to a specific narrative dogma, although I doubt the film will go the Mission: Impossible route with Zordon going rogue and killing everyone except the Red Ranger in the opening act ("They knew we were morphin, the KNEW we were morphin!").

In this Nostalgia Generation a halfway decent looking Power Rangers movie, on a budget of over/under $100 million and converted in 3D, one where all the cheesy costumes and special effects were a lot less cheesy, could very well be if not the next Transformers then the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You have the perfect combination of "older adult fans who grew up on this stuff" along with "new, younger fans who caught up via Netflix or watched the new stuff on Disney XD." The franchise has had cross-gender appeal around the world and presents an easy lay-up in terms of gender and ethnic diversity. Lions Gate Entertainment is clearly aiming for a new big franchise to take the place of The Hunger Games and Divergent, and in Power Rangers they have a pretty perfect property that is ideally suited to today's franchise-friendly blockbuster marketplace. If it sounds like I'm blowing smoke up Lions Gate Entertainment's butt, you should know that I'm crying on the inside.

What keeps coming back to me is how much the tables have turned. We all know that Jaws and Star Wars turned the B movie into the A movie, and how Batman made pre existing properties the way to go for blockbusters, and how the crushing success of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's StoneFellowship of the RingSpider-Man, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl turned Hollywood into a four-quadrant worldwide fantasy blockbuster machine. The change can be most readily seen in how films like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) are treated compared to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014). But when you look at the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies or the original Power Rangers films and the first Mortal Kombat (which also turns 20 this August), they were small-budget B-movies that were counterprogramming against the "real" grown-up movies like Apollo 13Pretty Women, and Virtuosity. If they really broke out, as they occasionally did, it was something of a surprise.

But the lackluster performances of the likes of Mighty Morphin Power RangersStreet Fighter: The Movie, or even The Powerpuff Girls Movie (an animated prequel dropped in July 4th weekend 2002 during the show's peak popularity) were more-or-less expected and not considered real competition to the star-driven blockbusters or outright adult fare. Street Fighter: The Movie was counterprogramming to DisclosureSudden Death, Little Women, and Dumb and Dumber in Christmas of 1994. Today of course the opposite is true. The new Power Rangers will be the big movie of January 2017 (because a blockbuster can come from anywhere, even January 13th), and it will be the smaller releases and/or wide release expansions for the 2016 Oscar bait that will count as counterprogramming.

Today it is the big-budget adaptations of our favorite cartoons and toy lines that qualify as the A-level movies. It is now the so-called adult movies, star-driven genre fare (such as Tom Cruise's Mena, due January 6th, 2017), or even bawdy comedies that have become the new "B-movie." If/when we ever get a new He-Man film, it won't be a lower-budget oddity like the 1987 Masters of the Universe but rather a big-budget fantasy spectacular that will cause other studios to flee its release date and/or slot their adult-skewing films as "counterprogramming." Same goes with the eventual reboot for Mortal Kombat or the eventual Thundercats movie. I bring all of this up not to mock Power Rangers or to predict the fate of an unproduced film, but rather to highlight what is the end result of the not just the current fantasy franchise blockbuster boom but also our current geek-centric and nostalgia-obsessed generation.

This is the end result of a media (social and otherwise) that trips over themselves to not just cover an X-Files reunion or Fuller House but proclaim obsessive approval over every detail and every news tidbit ("Our first look at Mulder and Scully back together is PERFECT!!"). If it's true that original ideas and original films struggle to compete in Hollywood, it is surely at-least somewhat the fault of those of us who seem to forget that they aren't twelve years old anymore when covering the newest franchise reincarnation. In 1995 films like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers or Mortal Kombat were almost punchlines, and they were unapologetic B movies even in an era when many of the so-called A movies were merely bigger budgeted and more star-driven action fantasies. Today Power Rangers will be treated with utmost seriousness by a media obsessed with detailing every would-be recollection and reincarnation of the pop culture they grew up with. Today Power Rangers will be very serious business.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my websiteSend me a secure tip