A few weeks back, it was announced that the lucrative Transformers franchise hired a collection of high profile writers to come up with ideas for expanding the multi-billion-dollar brand even further. And it was all dudes, which caused a bit of a stir. Whether or not that had anything to do with this decision is anyone’s guess, but Paramount and Michael Bay brought in two new female writers to their brain trust.
Deadline reports that Bay and company have added Christina Hodson and Lindsey Beer to their roster of writers that is intended to help come up with ideas and shape the future of the profitable shape-shifting robot franchise. The new members of the team join a crew of heavyweights who certainly know their way around creating popular entertainment. Their ranks include heavyweights like Akiva Goldsman, The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, Iron Man writers Matt Holloway and Art Marcum, X-Men and Pacific Rim 2 scribe Zak Penn, and Jeff Pinker, who had a hand in both Lost and The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
This group knows a thing or two about blockbusters, and they’ll need that moving forward. After all, you’re going to have to get inventive if you want to top a transforming robot brandishing a sword, riding a fire-breathing robot dinosaur. That’s just all kinds of crazy.
Both Hodson and Beer are relatively unknown and untested, at least in comparison to their new compatriots. Warner Bros. recently tapped Hodson to pen the script for the new adaptation of The Fugitive that was announced a while back, and she sold a spec script, The Eden Project, to Sony. In addition to that, she’s landed on the Black List, a collection of the best unproduced scripts making the Hollywood rounds, a handful of times, wrote Unforgettable, also for Warner, is working on developing a pilot at FX, and wrote the screenplay for the Naomi Watts-fronted Shut In, which just finished filming.
Beer, the daughter of Sundance Film Festival co-founder Gary Beer, studied neuroscience and "the intersection of technology and society" at Stanford. So anyone who complains about the Transformers movies being dumb, she’s definitely got the street cred to up the intellectual ante quite a bit. She’s also worked on the upcoming Short Circuit reboot for The Weinstein Company, so she even has experience writing dialogue for robots and those who interact with them. She also has something called How To Nail An Alien in the works, as well as a revamped The Wizard of Oz, among other projects.
The idea of this whole endeavor is to expand on the Transformers cinematic universe, and, of course, make a lot of money. In theory, the goal of the team is to come up with new ideas based on the Hasbro toy line, and then go write them, taking the movie world in new and different directions. So far, we’ve heard that there is the possibility of a prequel story set on Cybertron, the Transformers home world. We don’t know how this will all turn out, but it is an interesting way to generate new content and ideas.
