As I watched the Power Rangers teaser yesterday in line at a Dunkin’ Donuts in a highway rest stop (VIVA LE CINEMA!), I thought to myself “Man, this really doesn’t look like Power Rangers, but it really looks like Chronicle,” the 2012 film about a trio of high school kids who discover a strange object underground and gain superpowers. Although this Power Rangers still has costumes and big transforming robots and stuff, none of that is in this teaser. Instead it’s about ... a group of school kids who discover a strange object underground and gain superpowers. Weird.

Such parallels were not lost on Max Landis, the guy who who wrote Chronicle in the first place. But it gets weirder: Landis actually worked on the Power Rangers movie several years ago. He was commissioned to write a draft which the producers ultimately didn’t go with. Instead ... well, I’ll just let Landis tell it.

Rumors of Landis’ involvement in the Power Rangers movie have rippled through social media for years. Earlier this year though, Landis even tweeted this excerpt from his unused Power Rangers script:

I won’t pretend to know a single thing about the inner workings of Power Rangers development. But given how Landis describes the situation in his tweet it sounds to me like it went down like this: The studio hired Landis, the guy who wrote Chronicle, to write something like Chronicle. He didn’t deliver something like Chronicle, so they brought in other writers to write something like Chronicle. Hollywood. What a place.

Mighty Morphin Power Chronicle Rangers opens in theaters on March 24, 2017.

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