Ancient Rome Earmarked As A Potential Location For Transformers Spinoff; Bumblebee Movie To Take Place In The ’80s

As Paramount’s promotional campaign for The Last Knight begins to enter the homestretch, the Internet is currently awash with scintillating promos, eye-popping trailers, and genuinely intriguing featurettes designed to uncover the secret history of Transformers.

That journey through time, one that is poised to whisk viewers all the way back to King Arthur (Liam Garrigan) and the knights of the round table, was made possible by Paramount’s decision to form a writers room and, by effect, future-proof the Transformers series. What began as a tight-knit brain trust assembled by Akiva Goldsman soon expanded to include the likes of Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), Zak Penn (Pacific Rim: Uprising), Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and Iron Man duo Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, leading to the creation of 14 story ideas peppered across the Transformers franchise. A Cybertron prequel movie and an historical epic have been floated in the past, and it seems Paramount’s brain trust has also concocted an idea that would relocate those iconic robots in disguise to Ancient Rome.

Fan site Transformer World 2005 has the report, claiming that the historical aspect of The Last Knight has been designed as something of a springboard to launch future instalments in the series. That includes the Travis Knight-directed Bumblebee spinoff, which will seemingly take place in the 1980s and feature “significantly fewer Transformers” than previous movies.

We’ve included an extract of that report below, which also fuels rumors of an animated prequel movie orbiting around the mythical origins of Cybertron, the famous home of the Transformers. Bumblebee, meanwhile, has a script from Christina Hodson and will seemingly skew toward a younger audience than its robotic brethren.

A Bumblebee spinoff, conceived and written by Christina Hodson, is being directed by Kubo and the Two Strings’ Travis Knight for a 2018 release. Set in the 1980s, it will feature significantly fewer Transformers, concentrating on the big, yellow star (who in the movies so far can only talk in snippets of radio broadcasts) and likely pitching a little younger, tonally. Also coming is an animated prequel about the origin myth of the Transformers’ home planet Cybertron, written by Ant-Man’s Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, set billions of years ago. And discussions have been had about one set in Ancient Rome.

Transformers: The Last Knight opens on June 21st. Beyond that, Paramount and director Travis Knight have mapped out plans for a Bumblebee spinoff headed up by Hailee Steinfeld. Look for that one to light up theatres on June 8th, 2018.