Thanks to our very own Newsie AzT, we can share for you a very nice article from Entertainment Weekly: How Bumblebee’s changes could save Transformers — and lead to an Optimus Prime.
This a very nice article from Anthony Breznican (senior writer at Entertaintment Weekly). He interviewed producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura about all the changes that led us into the new Bumblebee movie. We have a very will documented article that let us see all the future possibilities around the new Bumblebee movie, like a second part, or even an Optimus Prime movie.
We are sure you will enjoy this really well researched and written article. You can find it here or you can read the full transcript after the jump. Then, you can chime in your impressions on the 2005 Boards.
How Bumblebee’s changes could save Transformers — and lead to an Optimus Prime movie
ANTHONY BREZNICAN June 15, 2018 at 03:24 PM EDT
This little plastic toy could be the thing that saves the Transformers.
The upcoming Bumblebee film is radically changing the look and feel of this saga about shapeshifting alien robots, drawing inspiration from the humble 1980s Hasbro toy and cartoon and aiming for more heart than bombast.
It’s such an extreme shift that there’s a genuine uncertainty whether the fans who made the rock’em, sock’em Michael Bay movies a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon will be onboard. But Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who has shepherded the Transformers franchise since the first live-action movie in 2007, says the bigger danger was keeping things the same.
“If you don’t change up, you’re also taking a risk,” di Bonaventura tells EW in a new interview outlining how Bumblebee is scrapping the Transformers model in order to save the series. “It’s one of those things where there is no simple answer. You’re taking a risk no matter what you do when you make a big expensive movie, so why not change the formula completely and really hang in there?”
If Bumblebee succeeds it will not only rejuvenate a beloved but beleaguered franchise — and it could also open the door for other standalone movies, including an Optimus Prime film.
After more than a decade in which the filmmakers feared the colossal robots might not be relatable enough on their own, the Transformers are getting more personality. And they’re finally becoming the stars of their own films.
Stress Fractures
Each time Paramount Pictures turned on the Transformers moviemaking apparatus, it generated around a billion dollars in global box office. Often more.
For over a decade, the films about the endless war between Autobots and Decepticons rampaged through summer multiplexes, fueled by years of nostalgia and an enduring desire among summertime moviegoers to see things blow up on the Fourth of July weekend. The barbs of critics were knocked aside like puny arrows against the iron hull of these behemoths.
Then, last year, the Transformers films abruptly ran out of energon.
The fifth movie in the series, The Last Knight, earned only $605 million worldwide — still a big number, but about half what each of the previous two films earned. And given what it costs to make and market one of these films (an eastimated $350 million) that shrinking profit margin was cause for concern.
“The fifth one was definitely down,” di Bonaventura says. “The audience looks for something new at some point in time, but it’s so hard to judge when. I think the lesson was, after the fourth movie, that was the when. But we didn’t see the fatigue. We didn’t see the signs that they wanted us to change up how we were presenting it.”
But the Transformers braintrust was feeling it themselves. The Last Knight went into production with no end in sight to the Bay movies (except the filmmaker’s repeated claim that nearly every installment was his last), but di Bonaventura and his team were already exploring a way to broaden the cinematic universe.
“We were headed down the Bumblebee path well before the release of the last Transformers,” he says. “We had felt that with the fifth movie, we had sort of run out of room with where to take it.”
They decided to go back in time. To the 1980s.
That’s when the Transformers (at least as we know them) were born.
More Than Meets the Eye
Anthony Breznican
Okay, here’s the short-short history for those who don’t know it: Japanese toymaker Takara had created a series of toys that could change shape from everyday objects — cars, trucks, jets, a cassette tape player, and (yikes) a silver handgun — into blocky robots.
American toymaker Hasbro thought these were amazing, so they licensed the brand and teamed up with writers from Marvel Comics to give the toys a story and some individual personalities. The toys hit American shelves in 1984.
There were the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons, battling through the galaxy in search of resources, but there was also stand out figures to either love or hate. The gun turned into the megalomaniacal villain Megatron, the tape player became his monotone henchman Soundwave.
The heroes were led by tractor-trailer Optimus Prime, whose most loyal soldier was a little yellow Volkswagen Beetle named Bumblebee. Let’s put it in To Kill a Mockingbird terms: Optimus was Atticus Finch, and Bumblebee was his child Scout.
When Bay developed his 2007 live-action film, he made Bumblebee a Camaro. The vehicle’s introduction in the movie included a diss of a beaten down old VW Beetle when Shia LaBeouf’s character goes to pick out his first car.
Bumblebee transformed from being the cute little guy with a lot of courage but not much brawn to an unstoppable muscle car who fears nothing and kicks endless ass.
As they set about trying to make a Bumblebee standalone film, the question facing di Bonaventura, screenwriter Christine Hodson (Unforgettable), and director Travis Knight (a stop-motion animation filmmaker who directed Kubo and the Two Strings and produced Coraline and ParaNorman) was simple:
Could they strengthen Bumblebee by making him vulnerable again?
Camero Turns Into a Beetle
Honestly: The Beetle is not a cool car.
It’s an amazing vehicle, of course. Adorable and charming. But it’s not a sleek, high-powered Camero. It’s not something you think of as strong. It’s not cool — it’s warm.
That’s what the Bumblebee filmmakers grappled with when they considered making the change back to the character’s original 1980s form.
“That was probably the most hotly contested thing, simply because: ‘Wow …. um, and the Beetle can go fast? Ooookay,’” di Bonaventura says. “But I’ve screened [a rough cut] three times, and there has not been a single comment from the audience that they didn’t like the fact that we made it the Beetle. The warmth of it certainly helps us, but also, the sheer freshness of it is really fun.”
That shape creates the sense of an under dog, which is a good thing for a hero who is in a strange world, all by himself, trying to find a way home.
“Psychologically, you’re absolutely right,” di Bonaventura says. “It’s kind of funny. A metal guy made out of a Camaro, or Bumblebee … is one is weaker than the other? I don’t know, but it is how you feel. It is what your experience is of it, in a way.”
The other hero of the story is Charlie, a teenager who misses her father and is struggling to break free and find her own path in the world. The rattletrap old Beetle she buys at a junkyard is supposed to be something she can rebuild that will take her on that journey.
It turns out to be an alien robot, of course. Suddenly, her destiny is altered in extremely unexpected ways.
But choosing Oscar-nominee Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) for this role was also a major change for a franchise that, since its inception, has been targeted mainly at boys.
The Tomboy Heroine
Jaimie Trueblood/Paramount Pictures
“Steven had always had an idea that a young girl and Bumblebee would be a great combination, so we headed in that direction,” di Bonaventura says
That Steven is Steven Spielberg, who became a lifelong fan of Transformers after his own kids got into the toys in the ‘80s. Spielberg has executive produced all of the Bay movies, but stays out of most of the creative decisions. In this case, di Bonaventura credits him with suggesting that the star of the new movie be a teenage girl.
It was only a few years ago that the idea of a female-led action movie was considered box office poison. Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter notoriously emailed Sony Pictures to dissuade them from producing one, calling superhero films starring women “disasters.”
It’s a different world now, thanks to Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road, the Star Wars films focusing on Rey, Rose, and Jyn, and the blockbuster success of Wonder Woman.
That made it seem not just logical but overdue to cast a young woman as the teenage mechanic who helps a wounded Bumblebee get back on his feet.
“It’s nice it’s changing,” di Bonaventura says, acknowledging that the Transformers films haven’t exactly delivered strong roles for women. “When we were debating it, the idea of a young girl seemed to us to be a real change in our direction.”
And Steinfeld proved to be the fearsome flesh-and-blood lead they needed. “I’m just amazed at how talented she is,” di Bonaventura says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor never miss a beat for the entire shoot. It was crazy. We ended up ahead of schedule because she was just so on it all the time. We could move quicker.”
There’s a whole generation of girls out there, teenaged, and even younger, who are connecting with sci-fi action movies that previously were considered strictly a guy’s franchise. This could expand the fanbase to a lot of young girls, who can now see themselves as the Transformers’ human pal.
The risk, however, is incensing the hardcore fanboys who have gnashed their teeth over female characters in other genre movies. Will losing that small faction matter, if millions of women and girls replace them? That seems like an easy choice.
“What we are focused on is expanding the experience, which does expand your fan base if you get it right,” di Bonaventura says. “If you get it wrong, you’ll probably have a little backlash, but I don’t think we got it wrong. I know we didn’t get it wrong with her, that’s for sure.”
The Big ‘80s
Transformers 6 and 7 have since been indefinitely postponed and moved off Paramounts release schedule, but it wasn’t clear whether the Bay movies would continue when Bumblebee was being developed. So, the creative team thought it would be best to set their story far away from the modern timeline.
They decided to go back 30 years, basing their origin story in 1987.
“We wanted to firmly establish when Bumblebee got here,” di Bonaventura says. “We thought, let’s try to tell as much of the origin story of Bumblebee on Earth as we can. We have elements in Cybertron, but really Earth is where we spend our time.”
Paramount Pictures
Bumblebee is alone. He’s on a mission to Earth that goes awry. He runs into trouble with the robot hunters of Sector 7, the U.S. government agency led by John Cena’s Agent Burns. Bumblebee is also being hunted by a Decepticon, the jet from the trailer whose identity is still being kept under wraps.
When Charlie finds him, he’s badly wounded and conserving energy by hiding out amid the other rusting hulks in a junkyard. As the bee nest in his wheel well attests, he has been down and out for a while.
Setting the story in the ‘80s was also a nod to the original fans, the ones who sustained the Transformers movies through all their modern excesses.
“It gave us the opportunity to Gen 1,” di Bonaventura said, using the term fans have for the first generation of Transformers toys and stories. “When you look at the robots, they’re not exactly like in the animated show, because they would look goofy today. But they have, I’ll say, a little more of the silhouette of those.”
Smaller Cast of ‘Bots
This was one of the most important things to Knight when he signed on to direct. The complexity of the Transformers in the other movies rendered them all a bit anonymous.
Knight likes to point out that Bumblebee needs to be huggable. And if you hug one of Bay’s robots, the exposed churning gears would probably shred a human.
Paramount Pictures
Drawing inspiration from the boxy Gen 1 designs allowed the filmmakers to create a Bumblebee and rival Decepticons who can be easily recognized only by their silhouettes.
Plus, there were too many of them.
Another change was reducing the sheer number of robots-in-disguise featured in this movie. That allowed screenwriter Christina Hodson to focus on the bond between Charlie and Bumblebee and tell a coming-of-age story at the heart of this epic action adventure.
“She wrote a really beautiful script that really played into the emotion of the relationship of the two,” di Bonaventura says. “So looking at the movie from that perspective, we thought, we don’t want to overwhelm one Autobot with too many Decepticons. So he has three primary antagonists.”
Two others, who take the form of automobiles, are also being kept secret for now.
“In that sense you really get to watch Bumblebee be lovable, be kindhearted, be sweet, be tough, be a warrior, be protective,” di Bonaventura says. “We get to see a lot of him in different guises. Years ago I worked [as a Warner Bros. executive] on The Iron Giant, which is a younger story, and therefore different. But it has similarities to that. You really get to buy into the central relationship between the human and the robot.”
Future Movies
Anthony Breznican
We’ll find out of all these changes work when Bumblebee debuts in theaters on Dec. 21. If the movie succeeds thanks to these changes, expect a very different Transformers franchise going forward.
For one, there will be more Bumblebee movies, but also possible standalone projects focusing on other individual robots.
“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from the fans that they wanted us to do a deep dive on one or two of the robots, because they wanted to get to know them better,” di Bonaventura says. “Bumblebee was selected because he’s such a loved figure, and he’s also more emotional than Optimus. Those were the two likely characters.”
He held off on an Optimus Prime movie because the team felt, ironically, that he was too strong. “He’s a stoic leader, and you can count on him,” di Bonaventura says. “Whereas Bumblebee is the one who is more emotionally volatile. He has a lot of ups and downs. So it seemed like the best character to try for the first time zeroing in on one Autobot.”
An Optimus Prime movie remains at the top of their list. “I’d certainly like to do that,” di Bonaventura says. “It would be a very different kind of movie than a Bumblebee movie, but equally interesting and different.”
Peter Cullen, who has voiced Optimus in most of the high-profile Transformers films and cartoons since the ‘80s, has compared the Autobot leader to John Wayne, so that’s one starting point for a brainstorm session.
Right now, Bumblebee has to pull off his own film, though.
“If Bee’s successful, we can have a Bee 2, no doubt,” di Bonaventura. “We have a good sense of where a second movie would go. For me, the greatest thing that came out of the writer’s room was the sense that we could go in any number of directions. It opened up our minds to choices.”
The key to Transformers, always, has been change.
“We could do a time travel movie,” he says. “You could take almost any genre and do it. You can go back in the past, you can go to the future. So I think we’ve got an abundance of choices. It’s really more about narrowing them down than anything else, and deciding which one we think is the strongest one to go with next.”
Pichomp
View attachment 28049493
Can’t wait.
hthrun
I'd like a Drift movie that takes place in ancient Japan. That's where he adopts his samurai look and skill. He also learns honor there and leaves the Decepticons to join the Autobots.
HoneyPrime
I could definitely get into an Optimus Prime movie. I hope this somehow comes about.
Cosbydaf
Optimus Prime and Bumblebee Adventures (2021)
Faced with the imminent threat of their universe being reset, Optimus Prime and Bumblebee unite with John Cena, Hallie Steinfeld, Danny Devito, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and some other Autobots who don't matter and face off against a merciless purple Cyclops Decepticon named Scourge.
End credits teases the Windblade spinoff movie.
Autobot Burnout
Because Optimus hasn't had enough time in the spotlight apparently?
Seriously, the franchise is called Transformers, not Optimus Prime and Bumblebee Adventures. DOTM was all about him getting betrayed by his mentor, AoE was all about how he's actually kind of a totally shit leader, and TLK showed he's so morally ambiguous already that actually making him full-on evil basically does NOTHING.
We don't need ANOTHER film focusing on him.
jaws
An Optimus Prime movie would be interesting–his creation by Quintessa for her purposes, the evolution of Orion Pax into Optimus Prime becoming the greatest Autobot leader.
Necrisha
*blinks* Blitzwing?… You know what, I am totally ok with this. This could make for all sorts of a fun story.
NOCV
HAHAHAHAHAH
San Diego Comic Con 2018 – Bumblebee The Movie Panel – Transformers News – TFW2005
HAHAHA
Sablebot
No, I proactively educate myself on things-especially those things I spend my hard-earned $ on. Alot of folks today don't-and many marketers, sellers, and content creators bank on that (pun intended).
At the end of the day, I am already aware of some of the usual standard Optimus Prime origin story details, i.e., he being a librarian named Orion Pax before deciding to get actively involved in taking a stand against the emerging Decepticon threat, his friendship with a character named Dino, who'd later become his right-hand bot Ironhide, his other-half Elita-1, his connection with Alpha Trion and the legacy of the Primes bestowed upon him by the Matrix of Leadership, his arena battles with Megatronus, who'd later become Megatron, and many more.
I also realize that hollywood is going to (paraphrasing Ray Charles) "do what it do", LOL. However, that doesn't negate the fact that I and anyone else can also choose to see it or not, if an Optimus origin film materializes. Plus, I create my own characters to fill whatever void I feel exists-that's how I roll. You do you.
electronic456
Depends on the origin… Is he dock worker Orion Pax? Is he data clerk Orion Pax? Is he an Academy drop out?
Who cares what continuity the movie is set in. Just ask for a good movie.
Also are you really an educated consumer yourself? Or are you just being self-entitled?
Sablebot
Agreed. There used to be a thing that actually existed in larger amounts, called an educated consumer. . .IOW, if I want to know more about Optimus' origins, I can research them rather than seeing a movie about it. . .My $.02. . .
Xaxis
Made a small edit there for ya.
SilverOptimus
Paramount just announced a reboot for the TMNT Franchise. So, I'm guessing the new management team is taking major action to shed some light back to Paramount.
Gordon_4
In so much as I loved the trailer and most things about it, it’s a bit early to be hailing this as the Second Coming of Jesus that will cure our leprosy and vanquish the bad taste of Bayformers.
This movie might still be a colossal pile of shit, just for different reasons than those that preceded it.
electronic456
@drbeakman
I might have taken things a little too far but as far as I'm concerned the movies are the only thing you care about on this site. Nothing seems to have changed since you arrived and it is concerning.
And calling me deranged when all I did was provide caution is pretty uncalled for. Which bothers me more. By saying that, then perhaps you are pretty much no different which you and I should know should not be the case.
Also why would my understanding of Misery have to be the same as yours? Opinions are opinions. Again, are you the one that's always right? I said nothing of online fandoms but my understanding is based on why Stephen King wrote the novel in the first place which is to address the craze of his fandom.
I love the 2007 movie and you don't. That's another thing.
Please forgive me for calling you out like that. I acknowledge that it was reckless on my part. The points in this thread are already made clear so let's just leave it.
Meta777
Of course, buddy. Honestly, I was like that myself sometimes, when my frustrations got the better of me and ended up impeding what I really wanted to say. It's all about taking that time to back off and cool down, looking to more positive results over other medias (Smash Bros finally brought in Ridley, for instance! ), before taking another go and doing better next time. Bears repeating, you do have a good sense of ideas and direction; you just gotta take it slow and make sure you say what you want to say, not what your frustrations want to say.
Jeez, that's way too philosophical coming from me. Sorry for the pseudo-zen talk
drbeakman
So, by that analogy, that makes you the ankle
Did you just watch some youtube clips from the movie, or did you actually watch the whole thing?
i feel like anyone who truly watched that movie would get a different understanding
i wouldn't immediately apply it to online fandoms, i'd apply it to a woman in love with a specific creator
we are not in love with anyone here, we are actually hoping people get FIRED so new creators can come in who actually care about this franchise, which admittedly belongs to no one, as it is a compilation of contributors, the original being Marvel, but thats a whole other story…
point is i'm not holding someone hostage to produce something better, i'd be more than happy if old bonaventura picks up and leaves and starts a go-bot cinematic universe
Actually it's a very unfair thing you're saying
You get to imply that I have mental illness because I have reasoned displeasure with 5 sub-par movies, but if I imply learning disabilities for people who like brainless crap, it's an instant ban
Besides that, I don't see what's Misery-level psychotic about anything I've posted anywhere — simply because I want a better quality live action movie for transformers?
Are you seriously comparing my level of distaste with the absolute rabid behaviour of star wars fans for a female being the main Jedi and Luke Skywalker not being featured enough in the new films?
Perhaps it is you who needs to get out of the TF fandom more — the displeasure in this community is extremely tame by comparison
So it's all about you right? You, and your comfort. If I don't like something about it, too bad for me, I have to relinquish my stakes and shares to the person who is happy.
This is exactly what I mean when I state there is a clique on this board with a specific agenda to maintain the status quo. As long as "no one kills your buzz", the discussion can continue. "Don't make my safe space uncomfortable", aka don't criticize anything, or demand more from the franchise that is literally asking for your money to ruin something you love.
Now THAT is deranged
So you're laughing at the very idea of someone asking for better?
What kind of weird used car dealership salesman operation is going on here?
Insult the customer by laughing at them so they think they couldn't get a better deal anywhere else
Paok
Well, I didn't write 15 pages by myself and neither did you. So, let's move on indeed and no harm done. Have a good day man.
electronic456
Well I'm terribly sorry if there was anything that felt ill-intended.
I'm just not seeing much worth talking now that it is 15 pages. I guess we should both move on.