Remember a couple of weeks ago when we revealed the potential plan for a combined TRANSFORMERS Cinematic Universe? Well, it looks like now it is pretty much a certainty. During their stockholder’s earnings call, Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner revealed the big picture plan for the franchise as well as some news about the sequel to TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION.
“Our plan with the studio and filmmakers you may have heard some writers being hired and we have in fact brought in Akiva Goldsman to lead a group of writers to really create a strategic plan around Transformers. We think there are any number of stories to be told from the brand that has been around for 30 years with amazing canon and mythology. We would expect the sequel to the Transformers movie [TF4] to happen in 2017.”
While TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION was truly and stupendously bad, it still earned just over a billion dollars worldwide. The latest film had major product placement and international financing that took it to China. The franchise does incredibly well overseas and domestic audiences can apparently forgive shitty writing as long as robots are fighting and blowing things up.
Akiva Goldsman is set to lead the writer’s room for the expansion of the TRANSFORMERS series into spin-offs and other films. While Michael Bay has other movies he is working on, setting an expected 2017 release for TRANSFORMERS 5 should be plenty of time to get him back in the director’s chair.