Paramount’s impressive Transformers writers’ room has allowed some of Hollywood’s most well-known genre scribes to come together, hatch ideas for the future of the blockbuster franchise then pair off into smaller groups to tackle specific projects.
Yesterday, while at TCA, former Daredevil showrunner Steven S. DeKnight, a member of the brain trust, talked a little about life inside the writers’ room, praising it as one of the most creatively freeing experiences of his career.
Speaking to IGN about Paramount’s approach to the Transformers franchise, DeKnight waxed lyrical about his fellow writers’ room members and revealed that the scribes for Transformers 5 have already been decided:
It’s that wonderful thing where features are now taking a page from television and getting people together to really try and plan things out. It was a wonderful experience. Akiva Goldsman was fantastic and Jeff Pinkner, who’s co-writing the fifth [Transformers] movie with him, was phenomenal. Zak Penn… It was just a room full of brilliant, funny, amazing people. And we spent two and a half weeks in physically the best writers room I’ve ever seen in my life. Paramount pulled out all the stops. It was phenomenal! We laughed and joked and told stories and plotted out…
Goldsman has been the top dog in terms of getting future Transformers movies (including not just sequels but spinoffs, prequels and even animated titles) pitched, green-lit and eventually written, so it makes a lot of sense that he would work on Transformers 5, the first movie to utilize the writers’ room’s ideas. It was Goldsman who worked with Paramount to set up the group, enlisting DeKnight along with Zak Penn, Robert Kirkman, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, Andrew Barrer, Gabrial Ferrari, Christina Hodson, Lindsey Beer, Ken Nolan and Geneva Robertson-Dworet.
As for Pinkner, he has experienced writing not just core sequels (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) but complex television stories that exist with the knotted mythology of their shows (Fringe, Lost, Alias). Enlisting him to write a straight sequel is a no-brainer. Plot details are of course being kept under wraps, but Transformers 5 is expected in 2017, with Michael Bay directing and Mark Wahlberg returning to star.