I’m quite pleased with this.
I haven’t even seen the previous Michael Bay-directed Transformers film yet, or the Travis Knight-directed 2018 induction, Bumblebee which I’ve heard nothing but good things about the latter and I’ll have plenty of time to catch up on both.
What matters though is we have a new Transformers movie in the works from Paramount and Hasbro that’s being developed to focus on the planet Cyberton, and the relationship between the franchise’s two mainstays, Optimus Prime and Megatron.
Oscar-winning Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4) will direct the animated prequel from a script by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp). According to Mike Fleming Jr.’s Deadline exclusive on Wednesday, Hasbro/eOne will lead the charge on the film’s production.
The prequel’s development reportedly goes back to the script’s development in 2015 when Akiva Goldsman led a writers’ room at Paramount to plan a slate of Hasbro projects – two years before the release of Mark Wahlberg starrer, Transformers: The Last Knight, which topped the film franchise’s total box office earnings at $4.379 billion dollars in 2017.
Knight’s Bumblebee, written by Christina Hodson (Birds Of Prey) and featuring John Cena and Hailee Steinfeld, etched the franchise a little closer to the five billion mark earning $468 million, with producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura showing signs of sequel life for the pic centered on the Cybertronian Autobot.