Hasbro planning fourth Transformers movie to go with all of its other toy and board game movies
Owing to the slow erosion of our nation’s innocence, Hasbro reported slightly smaller third-quarter earnings than it expected for its dreaming of dreams, making of joy, and manufacturing of franchise films loosely based on its decades-old properties—a mere $1.38 billion in revenue, as opposed to the $1.45 billion analysts were expecting, back when they still believed in happiness. Still, don’t occupy Wall Street just yet: Hasbro is already looking to bounce back with a new lineup of “innovative, sought-after toys and games,” but more importantly, its equally extensive lineup of movies based on the names of those toys and games.
Undaunted by setbacks such as studios jettisoning projects based on Clue and Ouija, or the Battleship trailer giving the entire film industry sobering pause, Hasbro is still intent on developing both Clue and Ouija with slightly reduced budgets, plus moving forward on all of those other previously reported movies based on Candyland, Risk, Stretch Armstrong, Monopoly, and even Micronauts, which Hasbro claims is still being prepped as a possible J.J. Abrams project. They can only hope this is enough to staunch the children's tears that have been staining the stock charts ever since this morning's report.
And of course, all of these—plus the other, as-yet-unannounced projects Hasbro coyly claims it’s developing—owe their lives to the success of Transformers, so it’s probably no surprise to hear that the company is currently in talks with Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg, and Paramount about developing another chapter in the franchise, talks that probably dissolve into giddy, uncontrollable giggling over the fact that Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is currently fourth on the all-time worldwide box-office list. Shortly after that movie’s release, of course, Shia LaBeouf LaBowed out of making any more Transformers films, saying he didn’t “have anything new to contribute” to his character, which is apparently what he’d been trying to do in successive movies. But with the difference between Hasbro’s billions and not as many billions at stake—and of course, America’s sense of wonder—it’s still possible that argument plus millions of dollars will convince him to return.