The Transformers franchise was never exactly beloved by critics, but there’s no denying that there was a huge audience for seeing the Autobots and Decepticons battle it out on the big screen, as over $4.8 billion in box office takings can attest. However, after two billion-dollar hits in a row, it appeared interest was on the wane after Michael Bay’s final entry, The Last Knight wound up earning over $500 million less than its two predecessors.
Meanwhile, despite being both the cheapest to produce and the most widely-praised Transformers movie, Bumblebee became the lowest earner in the series by some distance. And now, it seems plans for a sequel are currently on hold as Paramount goes back to the drawing board in their attempts to reboot the franchise.
The Bumblebee follow-up hasn’t been canceled as of yet, of course, and there’s also reportedly a live-action Beast Wars adaptation in the works. But the future of the franchise appears to be in the realm of animation as well, with Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley recently hired for a prequel that will take place entirely on Cybertron. Which will no doubt generate huge excitement from any fans who got a kick out of Bumblebee’s nostalgia-driven prologue.
Clearly, Paramount has big, big plans for the property, and while details on the proposed live-action reboot are still slim, we have begun to learn a little bit about it in recent weeks. For one, we know that Unicron is set to be the big bad of the pic. But there’ll also be room for Megatron in the film and sources close to WGTC – the same ones who told us the franchise was being rebooted months before it was officially announced – say that the plot will eventually see him transform into Galvatron, something that will surely please many fans after the arc was adapted somewhat loosely and not very successfully in Age of Extinction.
Details beyond that remain unclear, but we’ve been told that the plan is indeed to have him become Galvatron and quite frankly, no matter what they do, as long as they move as far away as possible from Michael Bay’s approach to the franchise, it will likely go down pretty well with most people. As such, we imagine that this plot development will be greeted enthusiastically and as soon as we learn what else Paramount has in store with their Transformers reboot, we’ll be sure to let you know.
