Before Transformers: The Last Knight sunk the franchise to new depths in terms of critical and commercial reception, Paramount Pictures planned to follow-up its new Bumblebee spinoff with a sixth movie in the main franchise.
Originally scheduled for release in June 2019, Transformers 6 was pulled from the studio’s slate earlier this year following reports that Paramount and Hasbro had decided to bring an end to the ‘Bay-verse’ and reboot the franchise.
Well, according to producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, “reboot” isn’t quite the correct word, although he does confirm that the next movie will be “different”.
“Reboot, I always hate that word because for one, I’m not sure I really understand what it means,” Di Bonaventura tells SlashFilm. “We are going to do another big Transformers movie. It is going to be different than the ones that we’ve done before.”
“When we did the first movie, at first there was a lot of pushback that we weren’t doing it the way it was done before,” he continued. “My feeling was always that if we’d done it, you would’ve gone, ‘Well, I’ve already seen it.’ So how do you evolve things forward is I think the hardest thing because you’ve got to retain why people love it, but at the same time if you give them the same experience, they’re going to be bored with it.”
Di Bonaventura also went on to admit that the critical success of Bumblebee has taught them some serious lessons as to their handling of the franchise, adding that: “I think we’ve learned something in this movie about tone that I would think the next big Transformers movie is going to have. It’s not like we’re going to copy it but we’ve learned something. There’s more freedom than I think we originally thought in terms of what we can do.”
SEE ALSO: Read our reviews of Bumblebee here and here
On the run in the year 1987, Bumblebee finds refuge in a junkyard in a small Californian beach town. Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), on the cusp of turning 18 and trying to find her place in the world, discovers Bumblebee, battle-scarred and broken. When Charlie revives him, she quickly learns this is no ordinary, yellow VW bug.
Bumblebee is directed by Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings), and stars Hailee Steinfeld (Edge of Seventeen), Pamela Adlon (Better Things), John Cena (Daddy’s Home 2), Stephen Schneider (Broad City), Jorge Lendeborg Jr. (Spider-Man: Homecoming), Jason Drucker (Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul), Kenneth Choi (American Crime Story), Ricardo Hoyos (Degrassi: Next Class), Abby Quinn (Landline), Rachel Crow (Deidra & Laney Rob a Train), Grace Dzienny (Zoo) and John Ortiz (Kong: Skull Island). It is set for release on December 21st 2018 in the States and December 26th in the UK.
