While Lionsgate’s Power Rangers movie was intended as the first instalment of a series of films, things didn’t quite work out as planned for the big screen reboot of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise.
The movie – directed by Dean Israelite and starring Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler, Becky G and Ludi Lin – stumbled at the box office and grossed just $142.3 million worldwide, putting to an end any plans for a six-movie arc.
Since then however, Hasbro has acquired the Power Rangers IP in a deal worth over half a billion dollars, and as you might expect with a deal of that value, the toy giant has a number of plans up its sleeve including more feature films.
“We’ve now announced the acquisition of Power Rangers,” said Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner (via TokuNation). “This is really a great statement about where we believe we are in developing our brand blueprint. The fact that we can acquire the Power Rangers brand and plug and play that right into our strategy where we activate it in entertainment, motion pictures in the future and then of course across toys and games and consumer products and do so globally. We felt the brand was very under leveraged and undervalued. We feel we can exploit it to a much greater extent and it was a great opportunity to acquire the brand.”
Given that Hasbro has an exclusive deal with Paramount Pictures, one would have to assume that any future Power Rangers movies would be a full reboot, rather than retaining the cast of the Lionsgate movie.
