Paramount has officially revealed the seventh live-action Transformers film as Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. In the virtual panel, Rise of the Beasts director Steven Caple Jr.,franchise producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura and stars Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback revealed the title as well as details on the film’s story and characters.
As the title might indicate, it is pulling from the 1990s Transformers TV series Beast Wars which is set hundreds of years after the original Transformers cartoon series. Beasts Wars followed a group of Maximals and Predacons, the descendants of the Autobots and Decepticons respectively, as they travel through space and time and are marooned on a strange planet. As they take on forms of the planet’s prehistoric and jungle life and fight over it’s natural resources, they discover the planet is not what it seems and the fate of the future is in the hands of whoever wins the Beast Wars.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts will take place in 1994 and travel between New York City and Machu Pichu. The film will see Autobot leader Optimus Prime as its central hero alongside Bumblebee, but will also introduce the Maximals as they fight against the Predacons and a “new threat” to Earth: the Terracons.
“In their disguise they [take on] animal form,” said Caple. “In our film, they’re these prehistoric animals that travel through time and space, and we find them here on Earth. The Predacons in our film are more reptilian in nature. We’ve seen a few in other Transformers films, but [in the new film], we get to see another side of them. It’s all about building a backstory to these characters, and we’ll see that more on the Predacon and Terracon side.”
Caple and Di Bonaventura showed off designs for some of the new characters that will be introduced including G1 characters such as Mirage, Arcee, Nightbird and an “off-road” Camaro version of Bumblebee. On the Beast Wars side, Optimus Primal, Air Razor and Rhinox were shown along with the “ruthless and scary” Terracon leader known as Scourge.
“You’re going to see villains you’ve never seen, Autobots you’ve never seen, elements we’ve never done before,” said Di Bonaventura. “One of the driving decisions along the way is ‘Have we done that before?’ whether that’s an action scene or a character.”
As for the human characters, Fishback and Ramos gave some details on what their human roles are and how they might play into the film with Fishback starring as Elena, a researcher at a museum. “I’m playing…an intelligent artifact researcher who works at a museum,” she said. “She’s trying to get a leg up in life but her boss keeps taking credit for the work she’s done, so she’s trying to [move out] on her own.”
Ramos will play Noah, a military veteran who lives in Brooklyn with his family. Noah is “amazing with electronics” and is a father figure to his younger brother. “He’s all about taking care of the people he loves,” Ramos said. “[He comes] from a lower-income home, so Noah’s always hustling. The one thing I love about Noah is his tenacity and his heart, and his will to never quit, in spite of all the crazy things life is throwing at him. Then, it’s amazing to see his journey when we venture out into the world, when the humans meet bots and things start to happen.”
Beast Wars has been a fan-favourite element of Transformers with the series tying more directly to the original cartoon series. This year actually marks the 25th anniversary of Beast Wars and Hasbro has been celebrating in a variety of ways through IDW’s re-imagined Transformers: Beast Wars comic and the characters appearance in the upcoming Transformers War for Cybertron: Kingdom on Netflix later this summer.
How do you feel about Transformers: Rise of the Beasts? Are you excited to see Beast Wars brought to the big screen? Let us know on our social channels at @flickeringmyth…
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts will be released June 24th, 2022.
Ricky Church – Follow me on Twitter for more movie news and nerd talk.
