It’s rare that much time goes by without Hollywood relaunching a franchise, but not all attempts are successful. When the failure is of a movie or a series that is not worth it, but there are times when ends up condemning the most estimable proposals. That is what happened in the case of ‘Power Rangers’, the film released in 2017 that has just landed in the Amazon Prime Video catalog in Spain.
An undeserved bump
Directed by dean israelite (‘Project Almanac’), ‘Power Rangers’ was a big bet to relaunch the saga that began in 1993 with the mythical television series. For this, a strong investment of 100 million dollars was made, but then the hit at the box office -had a worldwide income of just 142 million-, which meant the cancellation of the planned sequels.
One of the things that probably played against him is the lack of a better-known actor among his five leads, something that years later would not have been the case, and that is that the career of Becky G as a singer exploded not long after, the popularity of Dacre Montgomery shot up after his signing for ‘Stranger Things’ and Naomi Scott Just two years later, she gave life to Jasmine in the live-action remake of ‘Aladdin’. However, at that time the best known internationally was a RJ Cyler who had stood out in the remarkable ‘Yo, él y Raquel’.
The funny thing is that this ends up working in their favor, since the film pays more attention than expected to its characters, allowing us to become familiar with them, get their own identity and we are left wanting to see how their adventures continue. And incidentally introduces a successful villain like Elizabeth Banks in the role of Rita Repulsa to prepare everything for the spectacular explosion of action in the final stretch of the film.
Plus, it does all of that without ever loading the franchise hallmarks, but updating them very effectively to keep what worked at the time but be afraid to update it a bit. Unfortunately, the public did not respond, but I am very clear that deserves a second chance and that ‘Power Rangers’ is one of the most entertaining superhero movies not to come out of Marvel or DC.
In Espinof: The 29 Best Superhero Movies of the Decade (2010-2019)