Even though production wrapped last October, Paramount still decided to push Creed II director Steven Caple Jr.’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts back by almost an entire year, with the seventh installment in the franchise not coming to theaters until June 2023.
When it was first announced the studio was going back to the drawing board after Michael Bay’s five-film saga and Travis Knight’s acclaimed prequel Bumblebee, it came with the caveat that two separate scripts had been commissioned from a pair of writers familiar with the realm of big-budget blockbusters.
In the end, the screenplay from King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Army of the Dead‘s Joby Harold won out over the pages penned by White House Down and The Amazing Spider-Man‘s James Vanderbilt. In an interview with ScreenRant, the latter offered his side of the story, and it sounds as though we won’t be seeing his effort brought to life anytime soon, if at all.
“So I know Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the producer of those movies, who’s wonderful and a friend and we were working on something else when he came to me and he said, “If you were going to do a Transformers movie, what would you do?” And I kind of pitched him this take. And he said, “Oh, that sounds really cool.” So they hired me to write it, and he said, “Look, just you know, we’re also hiring guy named Joby Harold, who’s a wonderful writer to write a completely different take.”
And I said, “Great!” I’m pro-writers, and ultimately they decided that Joby’s was the next movie they wanted to make and I’ve read it and he did a phenomenal job. They’re shooting and I’ve spoken to the director Steven a little bit and Lorenzo, just because I’m friends with them and a fan, and I think it’s super cool. But yeah, Rise of the Beasts is going to be really fun, I think. But it is not the Transformers that I wrote.”
Hypothetically, Paramount could realistically keep Vanderbilt’s script in its back pocket should Rise of the Beasts fail to catch fire at the box office, or if it could be reworked as a sequel or spinoff of some description, but we won’t be getting any of these answers for a while.
