Comics… Toys… Movie… Animated series… Manga adaptation… This brand has got it all under its name. We are talking about the Transformers franchise, which was first seen in comics format back in 1954 to attract consumers to the toy line of the series brought by Hasbro. The Marvel Comics published the very first original fiction to feature the famous robots in disguise; The Transformers till 1991.
In 2007, the first Transformers movie by Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg as the executive producer hit the screens and later in the same year we saw an animated cartoon series getting aired on Cartoon Network. Till date the movie got 4 sequels which earned a total of $4.8 billion worldwide and owing to the success of the films, we will get to see two transformers movie in the upcoming future: one in animated version and other in live action.
Over the years we have seen the fight between Autobots (heroes) and Decepticons (villains) who landed on Earth as their planet Cybertron was destroyed by the latter. These two factions of alien robots can disguise themselves by transforming into everyday machinery, primarily vehicles but we never really got the chance to know the backstory of what happened back in Cybertron. The animated film will be set on the Transformers’ homeworld of Cybertron. It will show the “origin story” of these robotic aliens.
Paramount Pictures carried out an experiment where writers from famous movies and TV series were brought in and all of them hatched ideas together and collaborated to flesh out the universe of the Hasbro toy line to come up with possible spinoffs, sequels and prequels for the Transformers franchise. Akiva Goldsman supervised the whole thing, and everybody pitched to Steven Spielberg, Bay, Paramount, Hasbro’s Brian Goldner and producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Mark Vahradian and Don Murphy reported Deadline.
The writers who took part in this experiment included Black Hawk Down scribe Ken Nolan, X-Men: The Last Stand and The Incredible Hulk‘s Zak Penn, “Marvel’s Daredevil” season one showrunner Steven DeKnight, Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, Iron Man writing pair Art Marcum and Matt Holloway were among the few.
Academy Award winner Akiva Goldsman (I Am Legend, A Beautiful Mind, Star Trek) is set to write Transformers 5 while Ant-Man scribes Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari will script an animated “origin story” film that will be set on the Transformers’ homeworld of Cybertron.