A mega budget sci-fi franchise powered by the idea of giant alien robots kicking the crap out of each other in an intergalactic war that’s spanned millennia was never going to position the human characters at the forefront, but the Transformers franchise has still always been painfully lacking when it comes to delivering audience surrogates with more than one dimension.
Admittedly, things got off to a fairly promising start when Michael Bay’s opening salvo followed the simple ‘boy and his car’ template for a while, before the next four and a half movies devolved into increasingly nonsensical pyrotechnics. Trying to name even a handful of Transformers‘ humans is a tough task, with the overwhelming majority of them existing almost entirely as ciphers used to advance the plot, with barely a genuine personality in sight.
That’s one major mistake that at least one of the two projects in development should be looking to fix, and Travis Knight’s Bumblebee set a solid precedent with Hailee Steinfeld’s Charlie Watson, but insider Daniel Richtman is now claiming that Megan Fox is being eyed for a return to Transformers as Mikaela Barnes, though there isn’t anything in the way of additional details on where she might appear.
Of course, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that the actress didn’t leave much of an impression in her two appearances before being replaced as the underwritten love interest by Rosie Huntington-Whitely for the third installment, and the argument still rages to this day over who was more wooden as the female lead of a Transformers blockbuster.
There’s little chance of a Shia LaBeouf return given the whirlwind of negative publicity swirling around the actor, but if Paramount are looking to tie one of their new movies to the original timeline, then Megan Fox would stand out as one of the more obvious candidates.
