Castlevania showrunner working on an R-rated Power Rangers reboot

The showrunner on Netflix’s new Castlevania series, Adi Shankar, is working on an R-rated reboot of Power Rangers series from the ‘90s.

During an interview with Polygon, Shankar said his next big project was a Power Rangers meets Dragon Ball Z type series that would reimagine the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series that ran between 1993 and 1999. The show would be an animated series and Shankar said it would be the most violent version of the show to date.

“It’s a complete retelling of the first three seasons,” Shankar said. “And it’s going to be really fucking dark. Darker than any other Power Rangers series.”

Shankar is already working on the script for the first season and wants to launch the series within the next 18 months, but has yet to sell the series to a network. When asked if there were any potential suitors, Shankar said there were a couple of networks interested but he wanted to bring the show to Netflix. Shankar is currently working with the internet network on the recently announced Castlevania.

“Netflix is doing what every other network should be doing,” Shankar said. “I’ve worked with almost every network and Netflix just gets it. The world we live in now has disrupted the idea of what entertainment is and Netflix gets it.”

Polygon has reached out to Netflix for comment on the series and will update when more information becomes available.

Shankar said what he wanted to get away from with the revamp was the monster-of-the-week format the original Power Rangers series had to follow. Instead, he wanted to make it a linear series and focus on the essential story elements.

“If you look at what shows are like today, they’re long movies,” Shankar said. “It’s a format paradigm and I want to explore creating these types of new shows with Power Rangers.”

Like Castlevania, Shankar wants the Power Rangers series to have climactic battle sequences and feel large in scale. He wanted to merge the best parts of the Power Rangers series (the characters and the world they live in) with the aspects of DragonBall Z the series became famous for (the long and extensive fight sequences).

“We’re going to focus on the beats of what made each show great and turn that into one, entirely new Power Rangers series,” Shankar said.

Right now, this is just a concept that Shankar is working on, but he’s hoping to sell the series pretty soon. Right now, his current focus is on Castlevania, which he told Polygon will set the bar for video game to TV adaptations.

The first part of Castlevania’s first season will air this year.