Not a lot of people were surprised when the first Transformers movie without Michael Bay at the helm turned out to be the best one yet by quite some distance, although audiences had become so fatigued by watching walls of pixels smash into each other over the previous decade that Travis Knight’s Bumblebee wound up as the lowest-grossing installment in the entire series.
The prequel offered everything fans wanted to see from a live-action Transformers, though, deftly balancing nostalgia for the original versions of the characters with a focus on the human story at the center, which was a million miles away from the tedious pyrotechnics, convoluted plotting and paper thin humans that defined the Bay era.
Creed II director Steven Caple Jr.’s upcoming reboot is set to be a pivotal moment for the property, one that’s going to go a long way to determining the continued viability of Transformers given the massive cost involved in bringing the Autobots and Decepticons to life. What exactly it’ll offer us remains to be seen, but insider Daniel Richtman is now claiming that the franchise will be moving into new territory soon and looking to explore different areas, including the comedy and heist genre. Unfortunately, though, the tipster offers little else in the way of additional details.
It was previously reported that the next outing will be a heist thriller set in the 1990s, but that came from a different source, while barely a week seems to go by without Richtman offering up some sort of update on where Transformers could be headed. For now, though, all we know is that the next blockbuster is tentatively scheduled to arrive next summer with Caple Jr. at the helm working from a script by Joby Harold, and anything else remains confined to the realm of rumor and speculation.
