“A new team at Paramount will reset the Transformers Live-Action Movie Series following the release of Bumblebee: The Movie.” This is the latest word on the multi-billion dollar film franchise. It sounds as though the studio is looking to hard reboot following this December’s ‘Bumblebee’ which was previously seen as an attempt to launch a second franchise within a shared universe. But last year’s ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ may have under-performed to ‘Amazing Spider-Man 2’ levels, leading to a planned renovation that will result in a drought in Robots In Disguise films for the next few years.
With Toy Fair in New York underway, it appears that the ‘Transformers 6’ toy line has been cancelled. It seems that with Michael Bay seemingly departing the franchise for good, and following the news that the ‘Transformers’ writers room had been disbanded, Paramount is looking to go in a new direction and has scuttled plans for any further films following ‘Bumblebee’ until at least 2021. That’s not a huge span of time when it comes to making tentpole movies. And after the lukewarm reception to ‘The Last Knight’, it seems that audiences want the same thing.
In other news, it sounds as though a new agreement has been instated between Hasbro and Paramount which gives the toy company greater creative control over the films it greenlights. As much money as the ‘Transformers’ movies have made– over $4 billion– they have consistently been trashed by critics and audiences (at least in the U.S.). A huge chunk of their earnings have come from the foreign market– in particular China– where screenwriting has taken a second fiddle to CGI spectacle.
This doesn’t mean that there won’t be any Hasbro/Paramount movies. While it appears that ‘Transformers’ has been taken off the release schedule, there are plans for a new ‘G.I. Joe’ and more, based on this graphic:
Yes, there appears to be a new ‘G.I. Joe’ coming in 2020. And while Hasbro announced ambitious plans for a shared universe of several of their properties on the big screen, there has been little news about these projects. But it looks like both ‘Micronauts’ and ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ are coming in 2020 and 2021 respectively. The forth film isn’t named, but it could be a reboot of ‘Transformers’. Then again it could be ‘M.A.S.K.: Mobile Armored Strike Komand’ or ‘Visionaries’. One thing we know for sure is that it isn’t a sequel to ‘Jem & The Holograms‘.
Well… we’ll keep you posted as things unfold. The Hasbro properties certainly have potential at the box office, but they really need to start delivering higher quality projects.
Source: Collider
