Power Rangers

The series latest season will premiere there next year.

The ’90s weren’t that long ago!

A follow-up to last year’s ‘Power Rangers’ movie is on the way.

How far off are we from a Transformers/Power Rangers crossover?

Major news from the world of multi-colored plastic building blocks.

Alright, I’m going to be completely honest: when I saw that Power Rangers director Dean Isrealite had commented on his film’s PG-13 rating, I thought we were in for another round of confusing comments about the need for R-rated summer movies. Given the worldwide success of Deadpool, we’ve seen plenty of studios succumb to the siren song of mature adaptations. Warner Bros. has openly pledged to make more R-rated DC animated movies. 20th Century Fox will reportedly push for an R-rating with its upcoming Venom cinematic universe. Even Marvel, the current lead dog of superhero films, has felt compelled to weigh in on the issue (spoiler alert: it’s not going to happen). So sure, why not add Power Rangers to the mix?

Large studios are slooooowly introducing more diverse characters into their movies, and this year have been dipping a toe into the LGBT spectrum. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast featured that “exclusively gay moment,” and Power Rangers boasted history’s first gay movie superhero, but we have yet to have anything concrete. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 director James Gunn was asked about whether he’d consider putting a gay character in one of his Marvel movies, and his response kinda sounded like he already had.

In a parallel universe where Paramount Pictures doesn’t alienate its fanbase, we might be talking about Ghost in the Shell as the big winner of this weekend and the de facto start of a new wave of Japanese Hollywood adaptations. Instead, DreamWorks Animation and The Boss Baby blew up the box office, no doubt delighting a handful of DreamWorks executives who watched the Ghost in the Shell controversy unfold with glasses of champagne in hand. After all, nobody’s going to boycott a movie about a baby who wears a suit.

After several weeks of limited movement, a handful of new releases prompted a pretty thorough shakeup of the Box Office Top 10. While Beauty and the Beast continued its unstoppable assault on the domestic box office, we also said hello this weekend to three new movies and goodbye to a handful of old favorites from the first few months of the year. Let’s start with the estimated numbers as of Sunday afternoon.

The joy of the Power Rangers TV series was how campy it was. It was pure fun to watch teenagers jump around in nerdy spandex suits, fly giant robot machines, and fight ridiculous monsters (one was called Mr. Ticklesneezer, another was, I kid you not, Chunky Chicken). To make a modern Power Rangers movie you can either embody that wacky spirit, scrap it for a gritty reboot, or try to do both with middling results. Saban’s Power Rangers takes the latter route, updating the ‘90s series as an edgier, darker origin story with shards of silliness. The problem is, Power Rangers is never quite sure if it wants to distance itself from the source material or embrace it.