Nobody goes to see the Transformers franchise on the big screen for the human characters, but that doesn’t mean the writers can’t at least try to craft some well-rounded protagonists that the audience can actually root for and invest in. Michael Bay’s time at the helm was almost entirely driven by spectacle over story, and it’s no coincidence that reviews kept getting progressively worse.
It’s even less surprising that Travis Knight’s Bumblebee placed Hailee Steinfeld’s Charlie at the very center of every single plot thread and turned out to be the best entry in the series yet. Steven J. Caple’s 1990s-set Rise of the Beasts is now shooting, and while it’s set to double down on fan service, the filmmaker has recruited a pair of hugely talented leads in Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback.
However, longtime Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura has made it perfectly clear that the seventh installment isn’t going to shy away from big budget pyrotechnics either, but the focus is on bringing something to the table that fans haven’t seen in live-action before.
“Part of the new news is that if you’ve seen and been a fan of the other movies, you’re going to see villains you’ve ever seen before. You’re going to see Autobots that you’ve never seen before. You’re going to see a lot of elements that we’ve never done before. And it’s one of the driving decisions that we are making along the way is, okay, have we done that before? Whether that’s an action scene or whether that’s a character.”
It’s less than year until Transformers: Rise of the Beasts hits the big screen, and fingers crossed it arrests the critical and commercial slide that dogged the latter years of the Bay era, because Bumblebee is definitely the template that Caple Jr. and his crew should be drawing inspiration from.
So far, Peter Cullen and Ron Perlman have been confirmed to engage in the battle of the badass voice actors as Optimus Prime and his Maximal counterpart Optimus Primal, so at least we know there’s going to be plenty of gravitas on display from the Cyberton natives in among the explosions and destruction.