The gritty reboot trend isn’t going away any time soon, and according to Bryan Cranston—who has signed on to play floating head in charge Zordon—the upcoming Mighty Morphin Power Rangers big-screen reboot owes more to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight than the original show.
“At first, I was reticent to looking at the role because I remember the television series was kind of farcical and silly,” Cranston told The Huffington Post. “I wasn’t really high on it until I talked to the producer and read the script and talked to the director. After that I went, ‘This is different. This is as different a reimagining as the Batman television series as it became the [Christopher Nolan] Batman movie series.”
Out of the new cast for the film—which includes Elizabeth Banks as Rita Repulsa and a cadre of up-and-comers—Cranston would be the authority. The former Walter White used to do voiceover work on the original Saban cash grab that cobbled together fight sequences from the Japanese television show Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger with low-paid actors shot on cheap sets for American consumption:
Cranston doesn’t know if the film will go as dark as The Dark Knight, particularly as the the studio would really like to garner a PG or PG-13 rating. (Hopefully, longtime fans will be treated to an extended R-rated cut including plenty of brutal violence and raw sexuality on the eventual Blu-ray release). Cranston does believe that a certain gravitas is necessary when dealing with teenage characters “going through high school and the cliques and the popularity or lack thereof,” though. “The bullies and all the different sections and sub-sections of high school life, and the insecurities of these kids and things like that—hopes and dreams—and you embrace all of that into a retelling of the Power Rangers.”
Power Rangers is slated for release March 24, 2017.