By the time Michael Bay’s time in charge of the franchise had drawn to a close, audience apathy had clearly started to affect the Transformers brand, with box office takings nosediving by over half a billion dollars between Age of Extinction and The Last Knight. Undeterred, we’re getting another installment next summer, with Steven Caple Jr.’s Rise of the Beasts looking to arrest the commercial slide that also saw Bumblebee become the lowest-grossing entry so far.
Some folks might roll their eyes at the mere thought of a seventh Transformers film, but there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Rise of the Beasts is a direct sequel to Bumblebee that takes place in the 1990s, so it isn’t beholden to Bay’s convoluted mythology in the slightest, and Caple Jr. has already hinted that he’s planning to draw inspiration from James Cameron’s all-time classic Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
We’re also getting elements of Beast Wars thrown into the mix, doubling down on nostalgia and fan service in what should hopefully get the skeptics back on side. It’ll be hard to top the prologue of Bumblebee, which was nothing but pure catnip for Generation 1 enthusiasts, but recent set photos have indicated that Rise of the Beasts is making some serious deviations from the source material in terms of the Autobots’ vehicular forms.
In the original animated series, Mirage was a Formula 1 car with white and blue trim, before becoming a Ferrari in the Bay timeline. The Rise of the Beasts set photos showed a pair of Porsches, which at least hints that the Cybertronian native will retain his abilities to project multiple versions of himself, even if it isn’t quite the strict adherence to the lore that a lot of longtime fans would have been hoping to see.