Michael Bay may have shepherded five Transformers movies to multi-billion dollar success at the box office, but it would be fair to say that they found little in the way of critical acclaim. Each new installment appeared to get louder, dumber and more incomprehensible than the last, and now that the filmmaker’s involvement in the franchise is mercifully over it appears as though Paramount are keener than ever to get their proposed cinematic universe off the ground.
As well as an eventual Bumblebee sequel, there’s also a live-action Beast Wars adaptation in the works with Zodiac and White House Down scribe James Vanderbilt currently attached to write, a feature-length animation hailing from Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley and a full-blown reboot that will erase Bay’s movies from continuity, with the latter set to spearhead the studio’s rebooted Transformers universe.
We’ve previously heard that the latest reinvention for the Autobots and Decepticons won’t stray too far from the established canon, and could even potentially set up a crossover with Paramount’s G.I. Joe franchise, and now we’ve been told that the Transformers reboot is looking to atone for some of the mistakes made during the Michael Bay era by doing justice to a fan favorite villain that we’ve already seen on the big screen before.
According to our sources – the same ones who informed us that Transformers was being rebooted months before it was announced – The Fallen is currently slated to be one of the villains of the reboot. Of course, the character has already been used as the title antagonist in Bay’s second outing Revenge of the Fallen, but with the still-untitled reboot keen to double down on fan service, the creative team are apparently looking to put fresh spins on many of the characters that were wasted during the franchise’s previous life.
Although the reboot won’t be a straight-up remake of Revenge of the Fallen, the big bad will nonetheless be heading to Earth bearing a grudge in an effort to try and destroy the Autobots, which sounds a little familiar. Hopefully it won’t yield similar results to the last time we saw him, when part of the all-powerful evil Transformer’s plan was to assemble Devastator for the sole purpose of Michael Bay getting to make a joke about wrecking ball-sized robot testicles.
