Power Rangers Movie Will Use Mighty Morphin Character Names

The primary cast of Lionsgate and Saban’s upcoming Power Rangers feature film has now been formally unveiled, ahead of production on the movie getting started in the first quarter of 2016 (for a January 2017 release date). However, official plot details for the project’s script – as was penned by Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz (X-Men: First Class, Thor) – are being kept under lock and key for the time being.

Recent rumors have suggested that the new Power Rangers movie is not a reboot of the Rangers property (as was generally presumed to be the case over the past year), but rather a continuation of the most recent TV show installment, Power Rangers Dino Charge. Well, now we have new information that proves at least some of those rumors are not accurate – and, in turn, that this new Rangers film will indeed be a reboot/re-imagining of the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers after all.

Lionsgate/Saban has now officially confirmed the names of the individual Rangers in the 2017 Power Rangers movie, via its official Power Rangers Twitter account (see below).

Assuming the above characters will be assigned the same Ranger color in the 2017 movie as they were in the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV show (which premiered in 1993), the lineup will be as follows:

• Jason (Dacre Montgomery) – The Red Ranger/Tyrannosaurus
• Kimberly (Naomi Scott) – The Pink Ranger/Pterodactyl
• Billy (RJ Cyler) – The Blue Ranger/Triceratops
• Zack (Ludi Lin) – The Black Ranger/Mastodon
• Trini (Becky Gomez) – The Yellow Ranger/Sabre-Tooth Tiger

If this is correct, then the rebooted Mighty Morphin Power Rangers team will, like its predecessor, be a diverse collection of young teenagers… even if certain members now have different ethnicities than their predecessors. However, this lineup would allow the 2017 film to avoid some of the awkwardness now associated with the original MMPR team (see: the Black Ranger being played by a black actor), so such changes would probably be for the best – and still maintain the variation in race and gender that all Rangers teams have had (in term of their members) over the years.

This new information also indicates that perhaps more weight should be given to early rumors about the 2017 Power Rangers film – like the reports that it features re-imagined versions of characters like Zordon and Rita Repulsa – and suggests the recent rumors about the project being a lower-budgeted affair may, indeed, not be true either. In other words: director Dean Israelite (Project Almanac) may well be making the bigger-budgeted Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie reboot that many fans have been holding out hopes for.

Power Rangers will open in U.S. theaters on January 13th, 2017.

Source: Lionsgate/Saban