Paramount Pictures and director Michael Bay have been in the Transformers business for years, and business continues to boom. Bay will release his fifth Transformers movie later this year when Transformers: The Last Knight reaches theaters. And though the director stands by the fact that this will be his last Transformers movie, he recently told fans that the studio has plans in place to tell at least fourteen more stories in this massive universe.
The bombastic filmmaker was speaking to Transformers fans at a UK event at London's Cinemaworld IMAX on Leicester Square, where he revealed (courtesy of Yahoo Movies UK) that the writing team responsible for this reinvigorated Transformers revival has outlined fourteen new "stories" for the series. Details on future Transformers projects were scarce, though it is expected that Michael Bay somehow will lay the groundwork for future stories in the universe with Transformers: The Last Knight, though I wonder if many (or any) of the human actors -- from Mark Wahlberg to Anthony Hopkins -- will stick around for upcoming chapters?
These ideas likely stemmed from the massive Transformers Writers' Room that Paramount convened back in the Summer of 2015, where creative minds such as Akiva Goldsman, Zak Penn, Lindsey Beer, Christina Hodson Steven DeKnight and Jeff Pinkner, to name just a few. Even when that convention of creativity happened, we didn't hear any specifics about WHAT content came together, or how Paramount planned to use those ideas moving forward. All we know is that after the Writers' Room experiment, Michael Bay moved forward with The Last Knight, which (we believe) involves time travel, the King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the Nazis during World War II, and Wahlberg's spectacularly named Cade Yeager. So yeah, it sounds like they probably smoked a ton of weed in that room, then just threw whatever crazy ideas they could think of against the wall to see what stuck.
The immediate future of the Transformers series isn't in doubt. After Transformers: The Last Knight, Paramount plans to move forward on a Bumblebee movie, tentatively expected to reach theaters in the Summer of 2018. Beyond that, though, it's unclear. What IS clear is that, according to Michael Bay's proclamations, Paramount isn't planning on getting out of the Transformers series any time soon. Nor should they. The movies continue to make a fortune upon release. There are countless directions the studio could go with a Transformers franchise, including team ups with popular toy brands like G.I. Joe. And fresh blood from new filmmakers can only improve the types of stories told in this world.
Michael Bay's Transformers: The Last Knight opens in theaters on June 23. For a complete rundown of 2017 Movie Release Dates, click those words. And Michael Bay just dropped a new Transformers featurette that explains why The Last Knight will have better 3D than ANY OTHER MOVIE opening this summer. Watch that clip on the next page.
