I’ve talked before about the current present of Power Rangers, how in recent times there’s been a lot of success with Beast Morphers, the comics, and even some mobile games. That article covered some game ideas I’d want to see in the future, whereas this one will be focused on a general idea of that future.
In the monthly update of this month, I mentioned an article from The Hollywood Reporter that also looked at the future of the franchise. That article was uploaded October, but I hadn’t seen it until recently. That article was focused upon the changes that have taken place in regard to who controls the franchise.
In summary, Hasbro’s eOne arm is taking the reigns of the series, with Jonathan Entwistle overseeing and directing the adaptations of both movies and television series. Within the interviews, it is stated how Entwistle has an incredibly creative vision for the franchise that will deliver new content to both new and existing fans across a connected world.
It does seem that Power Rangers is set to enter into a new era of content, one that possibly is separate from its Super Sentai roots while still keeping the same core. After all, for as creative as previous directors and producers of the TV series got in their storytelling, they were limited in approach by adapting from a Sentai series. With such a split, it is possible that the ambition of the series will improve.
Upon reading about this change, I was once again thinking about one original concept for Ninja Storm. Labelled as Hexagon, it was intended to wrap up the open storylines of all series that preceded it, such as where Scorpina had disappeared to. The concept is fun to read, but at times does seem like it had become a bit too ambitious to be constrained by an adaptation of a Sentai.
If Hasbro put the money into this new creative endeavour, I could see something like that come to fruition somewhere in the future. Perhaps we could even get something like The Legendary Battle, but one that has more to it than just baseless nostalgia-bait. I can just picture Rangers from various teams coming together to help fight a common threat on the big screen.
For as much as I’ll love watching Dino Fury (gotta keep an eye on Pop in case they run through the entire season in a month again), I am wondering just how this new era will begin. Just what sort of theming we could see. How the zords operate and what kind of a morphing sequence we get. This will be the grandest change the franchise has ever seen, depending on how it is executed.
Unless the team at eOne really want to risk it, we won’t be getting a dinosaur theme for this start of the new era. If I was in creative control, I’d save that for the first movie. Yes, the 2017 movie also featured a dinosaur theme, but that was a modern-age reboot of Mighty Morphin’, whereas this new movie will create something original with such a theme.
And while a single connected world is going on within the TV series and movies, such a world can also be expanded on with the comics, and – for as much as Power Rangers is a visual entertainment – novels. And to bring this back around to the medium I like most, a connected world can also be expanded through video games. A team could be introduced through a game to have them then appear in one of the TV series or movies. There’s a lot that can be pulled off with such a new direction, and I hope it sees just as much success as everything in the last few years has.
Power Rangers has been very close for the last few years to becoming a core franchise of mine, but it still can’t become so yet. Seeing this news, though, has me hopeful that it will become one in the next few years. A franchise needs to really mean something to me across a variety of mediums for it to become a core, and as I’ve said before, the games are the only thing letting Power Rangers down at present. But if this new era brings a new wave of great games along with great everything else, it will easily become a fourth core.
Images Taken From:-
Power Rangers Super Megaforce: Legendary Battle KsiteTV Review
Power Rangers (2017) Poster Archived By IMDB
