Earlier this year, Paramount and Hasbro put together a team of all-star writers (mostly veterans of some comic book movies and Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman) to plan out the future of the Transformers film series. After a few months of tireless work that most likely consisted of completely ignoring all of the fun storylines and characters that people like from the decades of Transformers cartoons and comics, these writers emerged from wherever they had been sequestered with the plans for at least four more Transformers movies. The first of those isn’t even really in production yet, but as far as Paramount and Hasbro are concerned, this experiment was apparently a huge success.
Akiva Goldsman (a member of that writers room) was originally supposed to put together the official script for Transformers 5 , but now Deadline is reporting that Paramount has decided to put him in charge of a new G.I. Joe writers room instead. The plan, presumably, will once again be for the studio to find the best, brightest, and most desperate screenwriters it can, put them in a room, and then have them come up with movie plots based on character names and what will make for the coolest toys.
This strategy won’t stop after Transformers and G.I. Joe, either. With those two beloved properties finished, Hasbro and Paramount will move on to a toy line and comic book series that very few remember and even fewer care about: Micronauts. Various people have tried to make Micronauts movies over the years (including J.J. Abrams), but this seems like the most serious effort yet.