With over $4.8 billion in box office takings, there was no chance that Paramount were going to leave the Transformers franchise sitting on a shelf gathering dust. The studio’s experiment with a writers room was an abject failure, though, after they hired over a dozen scribes who produced a combined total of two screenplays, one of which was for Michael Bay’s turgid The Last Knight, while the other was for Travis Knight’s excellent Bumblebee.
Going back to the drawing board, two competing scripts were commissioned last year, and the one that the executives deemed superior would be the one to enter active development first. The winner was the straightforward reboot hailing from King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s Joby Harold, with Creed II director Steven Caple Jr. signing on to helm the project, which is currently penciled in for a summer 2022 release.
That’s raised several questions about the status of Zodiac writer James Vanderbilt’s Beast Wars adaptation, but insider Daniel Richtman recently hinted that it would be the first in a potential trilogy set entirely in space that wouldn’t feature any human characters at all. The tipster has now reported that the Transformers spinoff will be much darker in tone than the previous six installments, too, but doesn’t offer any further details than that.
Over the last two months alone, Richtman has also linked Dwayne Johnson with a debut in the franchise, while claiming that multiple spinoffs are in the works, including one for Megatron. As things stand, though, Harold’s Transformers script is currently the only one in active development that’s in the process of being turned into a movie, so anything regarding Beast Wars should be taken with a grain of salt for the time being.
