The Transformers franchise has only been away from our screens for less than two and a half years, but it can’t be denied that the property was in need of a sabbatical. The adventures of the Autobots and Decepticons may have hauled in over $4.8 billion at the box office, but Michael Bay’s time at the helm saw the law of diminishing returns well and truly set in.
It’s not a coincidence that the best Transformers movie is the only one to date that wasn’t directed by cinema’s foremost purveyor of pyrotechnic carnage, and putting the plot and characters front and center for a change turned out to be the biggest strength of Travis Knight’s Bumblebee, although it wound up as the lowest-grossing effort yet after topping out at $468 million.
However, Paramount were never going to stop milking such a lucrative cash cow, and there are multiple Transformers projects in the works once again. According to insider Daniel Richtman, in fact, they’re also going to make Megatron more human and complex, although the tipster doesn’t offer any sort of indication as to which movie(s) this is purportedly happening in, and how the franchise plans to give more humanity to a hulking alien robot that’s hellbent on taking over the world.
What we do know is that Creed II‘s Steven Caple Jr. is helming the next Transformers blockbuster, which recently cast Hamilton‘s Anthony Ramos in the lead role, while Angel Manuel Soto was announced to be tackling another last month, adding the robots in disguise to a slate that already includes the DCEU’s Blue Beetle. That’s about as much as we can say for sure, although James Vanderbilt’s Beast Wars script is still floating around out there somewhere in the ether.
