Michael Bay Wants to Direct a Transformers Spinoff Movie

CBR

By Brandon Staley

Published Apr 7, 2017

The longtime Transformers director says he’s done with the core series, but would be interested in directing one of the franchise’s spinoff films.

Michael Bay has ruled the “Transformers” film franchise since the series’ debut in 2007; he has directed every entry in the franchise since the first. Now, despite consistent claims that he was done with “Transformers,” it looks like Bay might return to the franchise as the director for a spinoff film. The move would leave a space open for a new directorial presence in the mainline “Transformers” films, but would allow Bay to bring his signature explosive bombast to a whole new world of Robots in Disguise.

Bay recently spoke with MTV News at the Las Vegas CinemaCon event, an annual movie industry trade show formerly known as ShoWest. While Bay has maintained that he will be leaving the “Transformers” franchise after the release of the upcoming “Transformers: The Last Knight,” he certainly knows a great deal about the planned spinoff series, which he claims already has 14 stories plotted.

“There’s some good stuff,” Bay said. “I would like to do one of them, though.”

The first “Transformers” spinoff movie currently in production focuses on the Transformer Bumblebee. The film is currently slated to be helmed by “Kubo and the Two Strings” director Travis Knight. According to Bay, the film will aim for a younger demographic than the mainline “Transformers” film series.

“It’ll go little younger,” Bay said. “It will deal more with his character, and it’s just about him.”

Bay said the film would be early in the “Transformers” timeline, which is itself a nebulous claim. While several “Transformers” films have taken place in the modern era, others have dipped into the deep past. “The Last Knight” will see its stars venture into the World War II era and medieval England. Whether earlier in the timeline means a return to the epoch of the Dinobots or simply a few canonical years before the first “Transformers” film remains to be seen.

Bay rebooted the “Transformers” series with the aptly titled action film “Transformers” in 2007, which put actors like Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox on the map. Since then, the series has gone on to feature various leads, like Mark Wahlberg and Isabela Moner, as well as a whole host of transforming robots adapted from the original Hasbro toy line and subsequent animated series, the first of which debuted in 1985.

Premiering in theaters on June 23, “Transformers: The Last Knight” is a production of Paramount Pictures directed by Michael Bay and starring Mark Wahlberg as Cade Yeager, Stanley Tucci as Joshua Joyce, Isabela Moner as Izabella, Josh Duhamel as William Lennox, Tyrese Gibson as Robert Epps, John Turturro as Seymour Simmons, Laura Haddock as Vivian Wembley and Anthony Hopkins as Sir Edmund Burton.