After Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction both crossed the billion dollar threshold at the box office, Paramount doubled down on their intentions to launch an entire shared universe around the Autobots and Decepticons by establishing a writers room tasked with expanding the mythology.
Spearheaded by Akiva Goldsman, the roster of talent included Christina Hodson, Ant-Man‘s Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrarri, Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum Steven S. DeKnight, The Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman, Iron Man scribes Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, The Amazing Spider-Man 2‘s Jeff Pinkner, Marvel regular Zak Penn and Black Hawk Down‘s Ken Nolan, while Geneva Robertson-Dworet would go on to write Captain Marvel.
The experiment was ultimately abandoned having produced just two movies, with Nolan penning The Last Knight and Hodson scripting Bumblebee, making the costly assembly of such well known writers pointless in the long run. However, there are once again multiple Transformers projects in the works, and insider Daniel Richtman claims that a Megatron spinoff is one of them.
Although he offers no further details, we know that Creed II‘s Steven J. Caple is directing the upcoming reboot of the main timeline, while James Vanderbilt was hired to adapt Beast Wars. There’s also an animated film coming from Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley, as well as the Bumblebee sequel that’s still said to be in active development.
Megatron might be an iconic villain, but it remains to be seen if the leader of the Decepticons is capable of carrying an entire Transformers movie on his own, especially when his motivations are based on enslavement and destruction. He’s not the most complex of characters, and doesn’t work anywhere near as well when there’s no Optimus Prime to be found opposing him, but hopefully Paramount can come up with an interesting angle for the project that’ll make it worth checking out.
