Star Wars turned sour and the Marvel movies are in a post-Endgame transitional period, but there’s no need to panic: Everyone’s actual favorite blockbuster movie franchise is coming back in full force. We are referring, of course, to the Transformers movies, with Variety reporting that Paramount is now actively developing two separate scripts for a “revamp” of the series that could go in two distinct directions. Variety doesn’t have specific details about the two potential movies, but we know one is being written by James Vanderbilt (of Ready Or Not) and the other by Joby Harold (an executive producer on John Wick: Chapter 3). Those are both encouraging choices, but it remains to be seen if they’ll have better luck with this extremely hard to fuck up brand than Michael Bay did.
(Cough prequel movie set on Cybertron cough.)
Variety notes that the success of Bumblebee, which was made on a lower budget than the Bay movies, introduced a “new opportunity to continue the franchise,” establishing that nobody will really mind if Paramount more or less jettisons any narrative consistency with the other movies. Seriously, Bumblebee went to the trouble of maintaining that Megatron had been frozen on Earth for a century, but still had no problem completely retconning when and how the Autobots actually got to Earth in the first place? Come on, guys! (That being said, the overarching plot of the Bay movies was awful and barely resembled what people actually like about the Transformers brand, so quietly abandoning it is the right move.)
(Cough or maybe even a post-war Cybertron movie about the ‘Bots and the ‘Cons having to work together to fight Unicron cough.)
No directors are on board with either project yet, but Variety says this is a “top priority” for the studio, so this might move pretty quickly. We can only hope! (Just put fewer stupid humans in these, for the love of Primus.)