After spending a year over at Marvel rewriting Ant-Man to accommodate for Peyton Reed taking the reins from Edgar Wright, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari have moved over to Paramount Pictures, where they’ve become the latest to join a Transformers brain trust being assembled by Akiva Goldsman. Deadline first reported their involvement and also made mention of one pitch that’s fast gathering steam over at the studio: an origin story set on Cybertron called Transformers One, that may be animated and land in between live-action installments.
Barrer and Ferrari join already-enlisted scribes Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), Zak Penn (Pacific Rim 2, The Incredible Hulk), Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and duo Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (Iron Man) in Goldsman’s writer’s room. The team is hard at work figuring out ideas for Transformers sequels, prequels and spinoffs in hopes of having nailed down the next sequel in time for Michael Bay to direct it as soon as he’s done with Benghazi siege drama 13 Hours.
Paramount is committed to expanding the Transformers franchise into a veritable universe of films that will draw on the Hasbro toy property’s mythology while introducing new components to the series. Though there’s no clear direction forward yet, Mark Wahlberg, star of last year’s Transformers: Age of Extinction, is signed on for more installments, so at least some future films will probably involve his character. Transformers 5 is expected for 2017, so that’s a while off, but these mega-blockbusters have a ton of moving parts that the studio and Bay will want to figure out well in advance.
If a Cybertron prequel is one planned project, we’ll probably hear more about it soon – though it’s hard to imagine Paramount wanting an animated Transformers movie when the massive CGI destruction set around A-list actors is a big part of what draws in crowds film after film.