With Transformers: The Last Knight just hitting cinema screens this weekend (and not exactly impressing anyone, including us), we’re already looking forward to a future for Transformers that is a little bit – i’m just going to say it – less Bay-ish.
In steps… Bumblebee.
The first spinoff in the Transformers universe. What do we know so far? Well, it’s going to star everyone’s favourite yellow car and star Edge of Seventeen’s Hailee Sainfeld and will be directed by Kubo And the Two Strings’ Travis Knight and is set of June 8th, 2018 release. So, yeah, we’re looking forward to a new flavour of Transformers (even if, like the current movie, it appears to be rewriting the history of the TF movie universe).
So what else do we know? Well, the TF writers room created by Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg, has come up with a few cool ideas for Bumblebee.
Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura spilled some details, including a much more Generation One feel (the original TF cartoon in the 80s is now referred to as Generation One or Gen One. Or G1):
“I know we’re doing a spinoff first in the Bumblebee movie, and that is a very distinctive departure from what you’ve been seeing so far… The objective of that movie is to develop more time with less robots in a way, and to go back to 1985 and go back to sort of the original heritage if you would of the Transformers. G1.”
’85 is of course the year the Transformers first exploded onto society and changed pretty much everything… anyone who things TF wasn’t as important as Star Wars is mistaken.
“So it has a very distinct idea in it,” continues di Bonaventura, “and then whatever is gonna happen with the chemistry is what’s gonna happen, but it really is a young female lead opposite Bumblebee, and I think Optimus is gonna be jealous that Bumblebee has his own movie.”
But don’t think this will be more of the same, because, while Bay’s movies so far all focused on big battles and invading troops of robots, this one will definitely not be that: “There are dramatically less Transformers. We hired purposefully Travis Knight, who is a very distinct filmmaker. You can’t compete with Michael—you’re gonna lose. And also I think the audience wants something different all the time, let’s keep them interested. They’re gonna get a very emotionally complex story, a very tight story in terms of its location and in terms of its storytelling.”
Hmmmmm… we’re not entirely convinced, especially when he compares it to one of our all-time favourites: “It reminds me a little bit of Iron Giant years ago when I did that movie at Warner Bros. It just reminds me a little bit of that where it was very contained and yet it didn’t feel small.”
Bumblee certainly has talent behind it and if they’re aiming for a more G1 feel and comparing it to the Iron Giant, could this be the Transformers movie we’ve been waiting almost 30 years for?
In other Bumblebee news, we may be seeing this on the big screen:
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Bumblee as a VW Beetle?! Holy crap, if that happens we’re in straight away!
“The interesting thing about doing a spin-off,” says di Bonaventura, “is it has to have some familiarity with the franchise, and then it has to have its own distinct qualities for it to stand on its own. It’s the story of a 17-, 18-year-old girl who, through a series of events, she and Bumblebee find each other, and they make each other whole. Bumblebee’s a very loving character. He’s got a lot of heart, so of course the idyllic life of these two is interrupted by the evil Decepticons. And how are they going to be able to deal with the problem without Optimus and without everybody else?”
Bay, of course, had a joke at the original Bumblee car form in the first movie… Uncle Bobby B, baby. Uncle Bobby B:
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And finally, in Transformers news, despite being very clear that The Last Knight was the last Transformers movie when he appeared on last week’s Grahame Norton Show, star Mark Wahlberg now doesn’t feel so sure that Michael Bay is really ready to walk away from the franchise: “It’s one of those things where Michael has built this entire universe right, and he will decide what he wants to do and how he wants to do it.
“Right now he says he doesn’t want to do another film and he says that after every film because they are so difficult to make and he pretty much has to do it single-handedly, even with all the help that he has because all of the movie is in his mind.
“So he’ll decide that and I would be hard pressed to see him walk away and put it in somebody else’s control and care.”
Look, in all honesty we liked a lot of Bay’s Transformers movies but we’ve grown tired of every instalment being a rinse and repeat affair (seriously, they aren’t even bothering to explain how Megatron is back in the new movie) and that’s why we’re excited for the Bumblebee standalone.
Thanks to Bay for bringing us big screen Transformers, but it’s past time you gave someone else a crack at it…
Or is that just us?
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