Transformers animated movie will be an Optimus Prime/Megatron origin story on Cybertron

It’s been five years since the release of the last Transformers movie, but the franchise will be returning to theaters this summer with the release of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. However, that’s not the only Transformers movie we’ve got in store. There’s also an animated Transformers movie directed by Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4) which will serve as a prequel, and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura dropped a few new details on the project while speaking with Collider.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura confirmed that the Transformers animated movie will indeed be a prequel set on Cybertron. It will also serve as the origin of Megatron and Optimus Prime, who were friends at this point in time. “This is something we were trying to do; we debated a lot about it in live action, and it just was financially impossible to do, which is, the origin story of young Megatron and young Optimus,” di Bonaventura teased. “If you know the origin, they started as friends, and over time things devolved for them and they ended up on two sides. So we’re telling the young Optimus and the young Megatron story. We really are telling the origin story of all Transformers, both what they were at the beginning of it, to how they grow, to how they grow apart.“

Lorenzo di Bonaventura expressed his hope that the animated Transformers movie will grow into a trilogy. “We’re hoping that there is enough emotional construct to that, that would lead to a trilogy of it because, personally, I think there’s a natural trilogy,” di Bonaventura said. “I’m not always looking to do multiple movies, but there’s a natural trilogy around their relationship. So, you’re going to see Cybertron in a way you’ve never seen it, that no one’s ever seen it before. Because we’re doing an animation, we’re allowed to really go all out. If you tried to make this live-action, it would probably be a billion-dollar movie or something.”

The animated Transformers movie is set to hit theaters on July 19, 2024, but our next dose of the robots in disguise will arrive much sooner than that. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts will take audiences on a ‘90s globetrotting adventure with the Autobots and introduce a whole new faction of Transformer – the Maximals – to the existing battle on earth between Autobots and Decepticons. The film will hit theaters on June 9th.