In an effort to capitalize on the unprecedented success of the groundbreaking Marvel Cinematic Universe, a whole host of rival studios rushed to establish interconnected franchises of their own, with the vast majority of them falling flat on their faces at the first hurdle. The key to making it work is letting everything fall into place organically, which is why Quentin Tarantino quietly linked all of his movies together in the same narrative space over nearly three decades without a lot of people even noticing.
A new fan theory has now claimed though that another one of these secret shared universes exists in the most unexpected of places, tied together by cinema’s foremost auteur of explosions and wanton destruction. By virtue of one minor character alone, the evidence seems to point to the fact that Michael Bay’s Transformers movies share a universe with 2009’s Friday the 13th remake, which was produced by Bay’s Platinum Dunes company.
While you’d obviously be forgiven for failing to remember the names of the vast majority of the characters in the Transformers series, never mind ones that only appeared for a few moments, in the first movie actor Travis Van Winkle plays Trent, the jock who gets dumped early on by Megan Fox’s Michaela and is then never seen or heard from again.
Two years later, Van Winkle popped up in the Friday the 13th remake, again playing a jock by the name of Trent, who ends up falling victim to Jason Voorhees. While the same actor playing two dudes named Trent with very similar personalities just two years apart might be a minor coincidence, the Michael Bay connection and the fact that the mysterious Trent is never given a second name in either movie is what spawned the recent theory.
If we just roll with it and assume that Trent is the same guy and the Transformers series and Friday the 13th remake share a universe, it creates the interesting notion of both Optimus Prime and Jason Voorhees roaming around small-town America at the same time, albeit with very different agendas.
