While the continue to prove immensely popular at the box office, Michael Bay’s Transformers films have certainly suffered diminishing returns in terms of quality, with the most recent instalment Transformers: Age of Extinction hammered by critics, despite its attempts to take the franchise in a new direction.
Nevertheless, Bay is back in the director’s chair for the upcoming fifth instalment Transformers: The Last Knight, and speaking to Empire, the filmmaker has suggested that the latest chapter will get the series “back in the groove” after the disappointing reception for Age of Extinction.
“[Transformers: Age of Extinction] was kind of an outlier,” said Bay. “Because of losing Shia and just figuring out where we were gonna go. It was testing the waters a little bit. This gets us back in the groove.”
Looking beyond The Last Knight, Paramount and Hasbro have big, big plans for the franchise, with a Bumblebee prequel movie set to arrive in 2018, and Bay claiming that there are 14 more Transformers stories written as a result of the studio’s writers room.
SEE ALSO: Two worlds collide in new trailer for Transformers: The Last Knight
SEE ALSO: Optimus Prime battles Bumblebee on new Transformers: The Last Knight poster
Check out our exclusive Transformers: The Last Knight interviews here…
The Last Knight shatters the core myths of the Transformers franchise and redefines what it means to be a hero. Humans and Transformers are at war, Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving our future lies buried in the secrets of the past, in the hidden history of Transformers on Earth. Saving our world falls upon the shoulders of an unlikely alliance: Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg); Bumblebee; an English Lord (Sir Anthony Hopkins); and an Oxford Professor (Laura Haddock). There comes a moment in everyone’s life when we are called upon to make a difference. In Transformers: The Last Knight, the hunted will become heroes. Heroes will become villains. Only one world will survive; theirs, or ours.
Transformers: The Last Knight reunites Michael Bay with franchise veterans Mark Wahlberg, Josh Duhamel, Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, John Goodman and Peter Cullen, while new additions to the cast include Isabela Moner (100 Things to Do Before High School), Jerrod Carmichael (Bad Neighbours), Laura Haddock (Guardians of the Galaxy), Santiago Cabrera (Merlin), Liam Garrigan (Once Upon a Time), Mitch Pileggi (The X-Files) and Anthony Hopkins (Thor: The Dark World). The film hits theaters on June 21st, 2017.
Originally published May 21, 2017. Updated November 21, 2019.
