At one stage last year, there were three separate Transformers projects in development. One was the sixth installment in the Michael Bay timeline, while a Bumblebee sequel was also mooted, and James Vanderbilt was tasked to pen a spec script for a Beast Wars adaptation. Based on what we know now about next year’s Rise of the Beasts, it looks as though Paramount may have combined all three.
The event unveiling the first details on the project announced that it’s set in the same world as Bay’s pentalogy, but it’s also a period piece of sorts taking place a decade after Bumblebee in 1994, while the Maximals and Predacons have also been confirmed to provide a Beast Wars connection. One thing we can guarantee is that it’s a fresh start for a series that had started to run out of legs, and the studio will be hoping that a new coat of paint will restore the property to its former billion-dollar glories.
Bumblebee ended with Optimus Prime arriving on Earth, as he and the title hero waited for more Autobots to arrive, setting the stage for the alien invasion that factored heavily into Bay’s time at the helm. In a new interview, director Steven Caple Jr. revealed that Rise of the Beasts will explain why Earth is so important to the former resident of Cybertron.
“When you say got to where he is, you mean ‘we need to protect these earthlings and this biological planet’. The way to look at it is he’s new to Earth and he doesn’t have a connection to Earth the way we met him in the Bay films, and the way we met him in the animated series where he’s already a protector of Earth. And so in this film, it’s forming, why does he have a link to humanity? And why does he have a link to earth? And that’s emotional. At the beginning of Bumblebee, we showed, he escaped from Cybertron his home planet. And so in a sense, he’s he literally is like an ex-pat here, right? He’s landed. He’s, he’s an alien and he’s never been here before. And so it allows us to get underneath say the stoicism of what we’re traditionally presented in an Optimus.”
You’d imagine Caple Jr. will be aiming to stick much closer to the template set by Bumblebee‘s Travis Knight rather than Bay, with the former much more in favor of the human element than his action-obsessed predecessor. Leads Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback are both fast-rising stars, so Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has all of the potential to be a complete rejuvenation.