Paramount knows what the people want, and it's "more Transformers movies"
Paramount’s stewardship of the Transformers movie rights has thus far been largely a disaster, with Michael Bay making five movies that are all bad (though two of them are arguably pretty fun) and then Travis Knight directing a spin-off/prequel/unrelated movie about similar characters that was at least reasonably fun, but even in the Transformers brand’s darkest days at Paramount (which, again, has been most of them), the studio has always confidently maintained that the world wants and needs more movies about robots in disguise. You may think you’re sick of these movies and you may think there’s no point in continuing to draw murky, poisonous water from this well, but Paramount—for better or worse—refuses to even consider that possibility. Disney will give up on Star Wars before Paramount ever gives up on Transformers.
Anyway, at the beginning of 2020, Paramount enlisted two writers to come up with pitches for the next Transformers movie, the idea being that these two concepts would offer different directions that the studio could go in as a “revamp” of the series. We don’t know anything about either idea, but the one created by Joby Harold (an executive producer on the John Wick series) was chosen by the studio back in November and it’s now moving forward with Creed 2's Steven Caple Jr. directing. But, Paramount being Paramount, it has now tapped The Defenders showrunner Marco Ramirez (not an enormously encouraging sign) to come up with a whole new script for a standalone Transformers movie with apparently no connection to the other movies whatsoever. It’s being directed by Angel Manuel Soto, who is also making Blue Beetle for DC and Warner Bros., but that’s all we know.
The question, then, is how you make a Transformers movie without connecting it to the other movies at all. One obvious choice is to simply ignore everything that happened in the Bay movies and Bumblebee (which Bumblebee already kind of did) and pretend it’s a new continuity, but Caple’s movie is supposedly going to at least acknowledge that the events of those movies happened, so it would be weird to have two Transformers movies that just ignore each other (what is, the DC movie universe?). The other obvious choice, and one we’ve been demanding for our entire lives, is a prequel movie set on Cybertron in the early days of the Autobot/Decepticon civil war. Of course, that would make it hard to add a popular young movie star whose job is just to react to explosions, but that would be fine because humans are stupid and Transformers are cool. There should be fewer movies about humans as it is.