Paramount’s Bumblebee is such a gear shift from the Michael Bay-directed movies that it could almost be considered a soft reboot of the franchise. But reports earlier this year suggested an actual reboot may take place in the near future, although none of that was ever confirmed. Now producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura tells Slashfilm that at a full reboot isn’t in the cards, but don’t expect the next film to be the same ol’ Transformers you’ve been seeing…
“Reboot, I always hate that word because for one, I’m not sure I really understand what it means. We are going to do another big Transformers movie. It is going to be different than the ones that we’ve done before.”
So what does that mean exactly? Well, one of the things Bumblebee does really well is tell a smaller story, with only three actual Transformers playing critical roles: Bumblebee, and the Decepticons known as Dropkick and Shatter. It shows that you can tell a self-contained Transformers story that may be easier for audiences to connect with…
I think we’ve learned something in this movie about tone that I would think the next big Transformers movie is going to have. It’s not like we’re going to copy it but we’ve learned something. There’s more freedom than I think we originally thought in terms of what we can do.
It was also a very big change just having Travis Knight behind the camera rather than Michael Bay. The approach was different, the look was different, and it felt like a completely different movie.
But if there is a reboot that would mean leaving things off with a pretty big cliffhanger. Transformers: The Last Knight ended with Quintessa surviving and taking human form, and agreeing to help scientists destroy Unicron. But we may see that entire plotline dropped because di Bonaventura says he has no interest in Unicron as a character…
“I’m not a fan of Unicron. It’s too big. It’s so big it’s beyond any sort of relatable thing I think, for me personally. That doesn’t mean it’s not going to be in the series someday. I don’t know that I’ve thought much about it honestly because we’ve been focused on this movie.”
Bumblebee hits theaters on December 21st.
