It’s been a minute since we last spent time in the cinematic Transformers world, with 2018’s Bumblebee winding the clock back to 1987 to show how the eponymous protagonist ended up on Earth. Well, come next year, the robots in disguise will be back on the big screen for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which is being directed by Creed II’s Steven Caple Jr. Now Caple has shared a first look at Rise of the Beasts by highlighting the movie’s cool vehicles.
As anyone remotely familiar with Transformers knows that when the giant robots aren’t in their humanoid forms either taking a breather or pummeling each other, they travel around disguised as Earth vehicles. Take a look at some of the rides that’ll be showing up in the seventh Transformers movie, straight from Steven Caple Jr.’s Instagram page:
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has been filming since early June, and while it’s unclear when cameras will finish rolling Steven Caple Jr. took some time out of his day to have a partial lineup of the movie’s vehicles photographed, with the filmmaker opting to pose next to the Autobot wheels. With Rise of the Beasts due out next summer, presumably we won’t get the first trailer until early 2022, but the above pictures serve as a nice reminder that soon the Transformers will be back on the big screen, and this will be an especially unique addition to the franchise.
Rather than return to the present-day narrative we last visited in 2017’s The Last Knight, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts will pick up seven years after the events of Bumblebee, although don’t expect Hailee Steinfeld’s Charlie Watson to return (unless she’s secretly cameoing). Instead, we’ll be following along with Anthony Ramos’ Noah, an ex-military electronics engineer who crosses paths with Dominque Fishback’s Elena, an artifact researcher in a museum. Along with Optimus Prime and Bumblebee jumping back into action alongside fellow Autobots Mirage, Arcee and Wheeljack, Rise of the Beasts will bring in the Maximals, Predacons and Terrorcons, with the first two groups standing out by turning into animals rather than vehicles.
Ron Perlman will voice Optimus Primal, the leader of the Maximals, with others in the group including Rhinox, Airazor and Cheetor. As for the Terrorcons, they’re led by Scourge, and his only confirmed cohort for now is Nightbird, his second-in-command. No Predacon members have been revealed yet. Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura said back in June that because the previous Transformers movies exhausted the Autobots vs. Decepticons conflict, it was decided to have Transformers: Rise of the Beasts show off different “tribes” of Transformers, hence the inclusion of the Beast Wars mythos. The movie will primarily be set in Brooklyn, New York, although there will be some action set in Peru.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts opens in theaters on June 24, 2022. Other movies in development for the franchise include the unnamed project being written by Marco Ramirez and directed by Angel Manuel Soto, as well as an animated prequel set on Cybertron that’s being helmed by Josh Cooley and written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari.
