Michael Bay and his Transformers star Shia LaBeouf may have sworn off returning to the world of Autobots and Decepticons, but that doesn’t mean Paramount and Hasbro are ready to let their cash cow settle down for a long nap.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon producer Don Murphy took to his personal message boards yesterday and chimed in about the prospect of what happens next for the franchise on the big screen. He promised “certainly not a reboot” and joked they haven’t grown up and demanded more money like Tobey Maguire. Any new talent brought on board would want a piece of the proven lucrative Transformers pie.
More intriguing is Murphy proclaiming, “I’m pretty sure there will be a second trilogy,” as if talks about the subject have already taken place and a direction is being hammered out by the studio. That’s not the type of bold statement you make without a semblance of justification.
A reboot given the franchise’s popularity and filmgoers familiarity with the surviving Transformer characters makes little sense so soon after the final Michael Bay installment. The groundwork is already laid and maybe, just maybe, some of the gripes about story and continuity can be addressed with a different creative team on the case. In a perfect world where the bottom line weren’t important, a new Transformers trilogy would be designed as such with an over-arching story that spans all three films. As Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides has proven, sometimes standalone installments for blockbuster franchises pave the quickest path to the bank.
In the meantime, every additional million dollars that Transformers 3 earns will accelerate Paramount and Hasbro’s desire to move forward with Transformers 4 while the iron remains hot.
Source: TFW2005
