The Transformers writers room was a total bust, with Paramount hiring over a dozen scribes and getting a whopping two movies for their efforts, which were ironically the best and worst entries in the entire series, as well as the two lowest grossing. Michael Bay’s The Last Knight wound up earning half a billion dollars less than its predecessor at the box office, and the franchise fatigue had a knock-on effect towards Travis Knight’s Bumblebee despite the nostalgic adventure going down a storm with critics and fans alike.
Still, the Autobots and Decepticons have raked in over $4.8 billion globally, so there’s absolutely zero chance of the studio giving up on the property anytime soon, and over the last few years, countless projects have entered development only to quickly stagnate. The Bumblebee sequel hasn’t made any sort of forward movement for a long time now, while we’ve heard nothing about Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley’s feature-length animation since it was first announced in April of this year.
Meanwhile, James Vanderbilit was tasked to script a Beast Wars adaptation at the same time Joby Harold was hired to write a movie of his own, and the latter won out in the end after Creed II‘s Steven Caple Jr. was hired to direct the next Transformers outing based on Harold’s pitch, which is currently penciled in for a June 2022 release.
Now, insider Daniel Richtman claims that a further three spinoffs are in the works along with the movies that have already been announced, which means there are once again potentially six or seven Transformers blockbusters in development simultaneously. The last time that happened, though, most of them fell by the wayside, and with Caple Jr.’s the only one with a release date, it’ll be interesting to see how many of them actually make it into production.
