Love him or loathe him, you certainly can’t deny that Director Michael Bay has put Transformers in the public conscious in a massive way with his four – soon to be five – outings for the Robots in Disguise.
Well now, and we know we’ve heard this before, it looks like he’s finally stepping down after the release of the upcoming Transformers: The Last Night.
And we hear many of you cheering – we know that many of you don’t like the movies (for the record, I really like the first and third ones), but we also know that, as a massive franchise, many love them too.
We reported not so long back that a GI Joe/Transformers crossover was in the works (here) but essentially Paramount wanted to leave it until Bay left the Transformers franchise – we also know that an expanded universe including Transformers, GI Joe, Visionaries, MASK and more is on the cards, so it looks like this may now be happening once Bay steps down and the writers room takes over the universe and ties everything together.
Anyway, Bay had this to say on his official site:
I’ve been living in this franchise for over 10 years now. For Transformers: The Last Knight, we put together a writers’ room designed to greatly expand our mythology, integrating our films in a whole new way. Every movie will interlink.
It was a huge task to expand mythology from the beginning of the world throughout history. We had a great team of writers: Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind); Art Marcum & Matt Holloway (Iron Man); Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down); Zak Penn (Ready Player One); Lindsey Beer (Barbie); Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Tomb Raider); Christina Hodson (Bumblebee); Steven DeKnight (Daredevil, Smallville); Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Lost); and Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari (Ant-Man).
Through the summer of 2015, they worked in a huge space on the Paramount lot, surrounded by over 10,000 concept images from the franchise’s history: the movies, cartoons, and comic books. They had a life-size Bumblebee, a Megatron head, and many other props staring them down. We pulled from everything. It was a fan’s dream room.
We brought in Transformers historians from Hasbro to educate them on where Transformers has been – so that they could figure out where it can go.
I can safely say that there’s never been a Transformers film with the huge visual scope and expansive mythology as this movie, The Last Knight.
It’s bittersweet for me. With every Transformers film, I’ve said it would be my last. I see the 120 million fans around the world who see these movies, the huge theme park lines to the ride and the amazing Make- A-Wish kids who visit my sets, and it somehow keeps drawing me back. I love doing these movies. This film was especially fun to shoot. But, this time might really be it. So I’m blowing this one out.
It’s a final chapter and a new beginning. Here’s the writers’ log line:
The hunted will become heroes. Heroes will become villains. Only one world will survive: theirs, or ours.
So what do you all think? Are you glad Bay is stepping down? Or you excited to see the Transformers universe expand into other franchises? Let us know all your thoughts in the usual ways…
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
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