If you’re a certain age, you’re humming “Go, go, Power Rangers“ right now, and it’s no wonder. After all, the franchise is already 33 years old (not counting the series it copy-pasted from), although it’s been on the decline for a while now. They’ve tried to revive it in a thousand different ways (with a movie, a new season, a Netflix special) to no avail, but Disney came in ready to change everything with a large-scale reboot. Spoiler: it changed nothing.
No one morphs!
A year and a half ago, Disney+ announced that the people behind the Percy Jackson series, Jonathan E. Steinberg and Dan Shotz, were preparing the Power Rangers reboot, the sentai series about kids who turned into ninjas to fight giant papier-mâché monsters. But now, after a stretch with no news, we’ve learned that it didn’t even make it past the development stage. In other words, let’s forget about morphing again.
The problem wasn’t creative; it was financial. After all, the original series they used for all the fight footage has been canceled in Japan and now every fight would have to be shot in the United States, which means an absolute fortune. On top of that, Disney doesn’t have the rights (they’re still Hasbro’s), so getting them means even more money. It isn’t just Disney’s fault; Netflix tried a while back too, and failed miserably.
So the series is left in limbo: the last season, Cosmic Fury, was made for Netflix, and its 10 episodes apparently didn’t do as well as expected. The bad news? It ended on a cliffhanger. The good news? At this point, nobody really cares all that much anyway, right?
