We knew trouble was brewing when Paramount hired Akiva Goldsman to head up a writers room designed to churn out more ‘Transformers’ sequels, and here are the first of the terrible results of that decision. Paramount has gone on to hire almost a dozen more writers to join Goldsman, including Zak Penn, Jeff Pinker, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, Robert Kirkman (creator and writer of ‘The Walking Dead’), Andrew Barrer, Gabriel Ferrari, Christina Hodson, Lindsey Beer, Ken Nolan, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, all of whom have the potential to write their own script for the franchise (which is why they are saying there could be 12 movies). The attitude of the writers room? Let let’s Goldsman paint us a picture:
“We’ve got a work space that is beautifully production designed to be immersive with a strong sense of the franchise history…We will look at the toys, the TV shows, the merchandise, everything that has been generated Hasbro, from popular to forgotten iterations, and establish a mythological time line. It has been designed with a lot of visual help, toys, robots, sketches and writers and artists. After that super saturation, the writers will figure out not one, but numerous films that will extend the universe.”
As others are saying, I’m not exactly buying this. The rich history and mythological stories pale in comparison to Marvel and DC’s actual library of storytelling and characters, as Hasbro’s ‘Transformers’ franchise has always had one goal in mind, selling more toys. Story did not matter nearly as much as producing new cooler looking characters and vehicles, and I’m afraid the movie franchise is going in the same direction. They have a “writers room” so they can quickly churn out more of this drivel so they can sell more toys, not so they can have an immersive and satisfying world for audiences to enjoy. The idea of a writer’s room quickly producing scripts is especially inane as most of those words will be tossed out in favor of “more action” and “more explosions” by the time director Michael Bay gets his hands on the scripts, so really, why even bother writing them?
Source: Collider