Though 2017 has already produced a handful of runaway successes in the vein of Guardians 2 and the so-hot-right-now Wonder Woman, two films that have arguably fuelled concerns of franchise fatigue in recent weeks are Alien: Covenant and Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Disney’s maritime adventure that was supposed to usher in a new era for Jack Sparrow and Co.
Neither performed terribly well at the international box office, and the particularly damning reviews for Dead Men Tell No Tales have called the future of Disney’s Pirates franchise in to question. Exactly how the Mouse House handles its waning juggernaut is still up for debate, but one film that will soon be aiming to skate around the pitfalls of franchise fatigue is Transformers: The Last Knight.
It’s the fifth entry into Paramount and Michael Bay’s global phenomenon, and even for all of the negativity Transformers tends to attract, this is a series that shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon – the latest installment, Age of Extinction, managed to score a whopping $1.1 billion three years ago. This time around, Bay and his creative team are poised to delve deep into the secret history of Transformers, with The Last Knight set to whisk moviegoers all the way back to Arthurian times when the Knights of the Round Table governed parts of Medieval England. There’s a good reason for that temporal shift, as we understand it’ll help shed light on a secret artifact that could hold the power to save Earth from total annihilation – not for the first time, mind you.
On June 21st, Transformers: The Last Knight will serve up another helping of good old-fashioned Bayhem. Whether it’ll be deemed good enough to launch a new era for the Transformers universe – Paramount has already nailed down plans for a Bumblebee spinoff with Travis Knight at the helm – will be told through time, but ahead of its arrival in two weeks’ time, you can refresh your memory on the franchise’s star players down below.
