The Bumblebee solo film could end up proving to be the soft reboot the series so desperately needs. After 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight – director Michael Bay’s fifth installment in the series – underperformed at the box office, it became clear the Transformers cinematic franchise had to evolve. Bumblebee was in development before The Last Knight‘s release, and is technically a prequel to the Bay films, but with some very minor adjustments it could prove to be a franchise revitalizing effort, rather than a small scale stop gap.
Even at the height of their popularity, Bay’s movies never really captured what made Transformers such an enduring franchise for so many generations. Bay’s CGI robots were technological monstrosities – little more than shapeshifting tools for the director to indulge in his infamous appetites for epic scale chaos. The human characters were mostly present to indulge in toilet humor and run in terror when the robots started toppling skyscrapers. Bay’s singular gift for making destruction seem almost balletic was enough to keep audiences coming back for more until The Last Knight.
Related: Bumblebee Trailer Already Addresses Some Of the Problems With Transformers
Fan expectations were low for Bumblebee – a prequel starring the mute Autobot scout set in 1987. But the warmly received teaser trailer suggests director Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) may have uncovered some magic in the robots in disguise. The designs aren’t a radical overhaul, but they’re cleaner, simpler, and more strongly evoke the aesthetic of Generation 1 than Bay’s largely anonymous looking mechs. Starscream, in particular, looks much closer to his iconic G1 design than the grey, ape-like hulk from Bay’s films. It’s hard to gauge from a teaser trailer – and pretty much every Bay Transformers movie had a great trailer – but the lowbrow humor and cascading, contradictory mythos of the previous films seems to have been abandoned for a lighter, more character driven take.
- This Page: Bumblebee Can Save the Franchise
- Page 2: Seeding The Hasbro Shared Universe
Bumblebee Can Save The Franchise
Bumblebee was always meant to be a lower profile spinoff, but it’s become increasingly clear that the franchise’s future may well rest in the Volkswagen Beetle’s trusty hands. Following The Last Knight’s failure and Bay’s departure from the director’s chair, there’s been an assumption that the franchise would pull a hard reboot, with Bumblebee as sort of a final whimper for the old iteration. But if Bumblebee is as good as it seems to be, and has managed to inject some heart and emotion back into the Cybertronians, why not just use that as the new starting point? It’s not as if the continuity of the Bay movies really makes any sense; every sequel contradicted the previous one in some way or another, with The Last Knight retconning the Autobots and Decepticons into integral parts of virtually every chapter of human history. Considering Bumblebee is set 20 years before the first Bay movie, it seems unlikely there would be many direct references anyway.
And while the movie was originally conceived of as a prequel, there’s no reason that couldn’t be shifted a bit through some clever reshoots, erasing any nods to the previous films and establishing this as the beginning of the Transformers’ story on Earth. Reshoots tend to get a bad rap as something only extensively utilized for troubled productions, but this would be a case of having so much faith in what Knight is doing to solidify his vision as independent from what came before, and to serve as a blueprint for what’s next. Legendary voice actor Peter Cullen has confirmed he’s involved in the film in some capacity, and introducing a nobler, less bloodthirsty Optimus Prime in the film’s third act would be a great way to signal that the franchise is ready to move forward in a new direction.
Related: Transformers 6 Removed From Paramount’s 2019 Release Schedule
There’s even a fairly obvious template for this kind of soft reboot – the X-Men film franchise. After hitting the skids with bombastic, boneheaded movies like X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, director Matthew Vaughn took the mutants back to the 60s with X-Men: First Class, a stylish, thoughtful period piece that was ostensibly a prequel, but ended up resetting and refocusing those films in fundamental ways that can still be felt in that franchise to this day.
Page 2: Seeding The Hasbro Shared Universe
Seeding The Hasbro Shared Universe
Hasbro has made no secret of the fact they want to get in on the shared universe craze, incorporating properties like G.I. Joe, Visionaries, M.A.S.K., and Micronauts into one cinematic world. Transformers is, of course, the toy company’s crown jewel, but by the time the shared universe idea began simmering in executive board rooms, the Bay movies had already established themselves as a fully realized – if loud and perplexing – world, with no room for those other franchises. Bumblebee could provide an opportunity to seed some of those other properties; G.I. Joe and Transformers have a long history of fictional crossovers, dating all the way back to the early days of both franchises in the pages of Marvel comics. F. Gary Gray’s M.A.S.K. film is in the early stages of pre-production, and it’s not yet clear where it fits into Hasbro’s broader plans.
But if third tier properties like Visionaries and Micronauts are going to have any chance of succeeding, they’re likely going to have to ride Transformers’ coattails. An argument can be made that a Hasbro Shared Universe is unnecessary and creatively vacuous – IDW’s interconnected Hasbro comics, other than Transformers, have largely flamed out – but if it has to happen, Transformers has to be its beating heart. This is another case where reshoots could come in handy to add a few nods here and there to those other franchises; the fact that pretty much all of these properties came to prominence in the 80s would be an added bonus since Bumblebee is set in the era of Reaganomics and The Joshua Tree.
Related: Bumblebee Will Have a Much Smaller Budget Than Other Transformers Movies
There’s still a lot we don’t know about Bumblebee. Other than Bumblebee, Starscream, and almost certainly Optimus Prime, we don’t really know which Autobots and Decepticons will be on tap, nor do we know what brings Bumblebee into conflict with the Decepticons. The trailer certainly feels like a breath of fresh air, but trailers have been misleading before – a fact longtime Transformers fans are all too aware of. And all of this is ignoring the fact that it’s going to be taking on Aquaman and Mary Poppins at the box office this Christmas.
Yet taken on its face, Bumblebee looks like the kind of film this franchise has needed for a long, long time, with a more intimate story to tell and some genuine emotional stakes. Even if Bumblebee was meant to be, essentially, cinematic filler while Hasbro and Paramount figured out where to take the franchise next, that doesn’t mean they can’t lean into their good luck with a filmmaker who has improbably made the big screen Autobots and Decepticons interesting again. Michael Bay may have taken Transformers to a new level of success and recognition, but he also made them a shorthand for loud, empty, soulless filmmaking, movies that exist to sell toys and light up the brains of twelve year old boys like so much candy and soda. Bumblebee appears to be the course correction that is ready to announce to the world what fans of Beast Wars, Transformers Animated, and Transformers: Lost Light have always known – you can tell thrilling, magical stories with Transformers, and it’s time to start proving it with the movies.
More: Transformers: 15 Most Controversial Things The Movies Have Done
Key Release Dates
Bumblebee
Release Date:2018-12-21
