Paramount simultaneously developing two new Transformers movies

The whole point of Transformers is to… well… transform… so it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that Paramount possibly wants to do just that to the Transformers movie franchise again! Director Travis Knight’s Bumblebee had already soft-rebooted the franchise in 2018, with the 1980s-set adventure tweaking a number of aspects of Michael Bay’s original movies, but the studio may possibly be looking to ignore that in head in another direction. Two directions, in fact.

That’s according to a new report from Variety which claims that Paramount has put in requests for two new Transformers movie scripts, penned by Joby Harold (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Robin Hood) and James Vanderbilt (The Amazing Spider-Man, Murder Mystery), respectively. Now let’s just ignore the fact that neither of those two names inspires any form of confidence in me, and focus on the interesting part, which is that these two scripts are reportedly being developed simultaneously but are not related.

It would appear that Paramount is uncertain on how to continue the franchise after Bumblebee, which was a massive success with critics and veteran fans of the original Transformers cartoons as Knight brought a level of character writing and emotion that Bay never could, but which ended up being the lowest-earning entry in the franchise with $468 million worldwide. We’d heard back in March of last year, after some hemming and hawing, that a direct Bumblebee sequel was in the works, but the plans may have changed as Deadline reports that Vanderbilt’s script may be a spinoff based on the popular Beast Wars (robots turn into animals instead of cars).

As for Harold’s script, details are vague. It could be set in the Bumblebee universe or not at all. There’s also no assurance that just because two scripts are being developed that Paramount will actually make both movies as the studio is seemingly taking a wait-and-see approach. Hell, neither of these new scripts could actually pan out and we’d go back to a direct Bumblebee sequel, or one of these could be tweaked to actually become a Bumblebee sequel. As a huge fan of what Knight did with that movie, I would be a bit saddened if we didn’t get to continue that story.

Last Updated: January 28, 2020