The dust has settled on the“Transformerswriters room”set up at Paramount Pictures, and the studio now has a game plan for how they’d like to tackle the franchise going forward. First up isTransformers 5, for whichMichael Bayhas inexplicably decided to return and directwithMark Wahlbergstarring. But while Bay and Co. will jump into pre-production on that film next year for a June production start-date, Deadline reports that Paramount has tasked screenwritersAndrew BarrerandGabriel Ferrariwith penning an animatedTransformersfeature that will followT5.
The animated film is one idea that was bandied about early on in the writers room process and has been given the “go-ahed” to become a movie. The film will focus on the origin story of the Transformers, taking place on Cybertron—the planet from which all the walking, talking robots hail. Barrer and Ferrari worked on Marvel’sAnt-Manduring production to do some on-set rewrites, but originating thisTransformersspinoff is certainly a major step forward in their careers.
It’s unclear if “animated” means a film in the vein of Pixar or something utilizing motion-capture, but it doesn’t really make sense to have a live-action Cybertron movie since the environments and characters have to be created digitally. Honestly, you could pretty much consider much of the past threeTransformersfilms “animated movies” when it comes down to it.
While Paramount put a great deal of effort into craftinga very crowded writers roomto develop sequel and spinoff ideas for theTransformersuniverse, it appears thatTransformers 5and this animated film are the only ones that felt ready to move forward with ASAP—thoughSteven Spielberg(to whom all the ideas were presented) felt that 5 of the 9 ideas presented had enough potential to maybe become films one day.
Whatever eventually happens with theTransformersfranchise, what’s clear in the near future is that we’ll be getting another Bay-helmed sequel (because $$$) followed by this animated feature. What do you think, folks? Is aTransformersorigin story compelling enough to get its own film? Will audiences still turn out in droves without Actor X and Supermodel Y leading the human cast? Sound off in the comments below.
