Since it began in 2007, the live-action Transformers movie franchise has been incredibly controversial, especially with the fandom. The movies are considered increasingly awful, with the fifth movie, The Last Knight, forcing even the most die-hard defenders of the series to cringe. However, 2018's Bumblebee was a huge change of pace and well-received for it. That said, the goodwill of the previous film will likely be squandered with the upcoming installment, Rise of the Beasts, which already sounds like a disaster. Featuring another overstuffed cast and far-removed characters, this new movie could potentially kill the franchise for good.
Rise of the Beasts Has Too Many Robots in Disguise
Rise of the Beasts seems to be expanding past the scope of the previous films -- and not for the better. Not only will it feature Optimus Prime's Autobots, but it will also feature Terrorcons and the Maximals and Predacons of Beast Wars. Considering how horribly the franchise has juggled the Autobots and Decepticons, it's already set to do an even worse once with these new factions.
The movie will have to introduce the concepts behind the Maximals and Predacons (who are traditionally portrayed as far-flung descendants of the Autobots and Decepticons) and the random presence of the Terrorcons. How they'll react to the Autobots remains to be seen. However, it seems like Rise of the Beasts is throwing a bunch of characters into one story, even if it makes no sense.
New human characters will also be introduced, with their own stories that will likely be woefully unrelated to the Transformers. Given the series' track record, these inane plots will probably take precedence over the robots, resulting in the only characters with any semblance of development being the ones that no one really cares about.
Rise of the Beast Confuses Its Characters
Before now, the Transformers movie universe was notorious for redesigning iconic characters, primarily from Generation 1, and giving them ridiculous, unrecognizable appearances. These characters usually didn't even act like their typical selves from any franchise iteration. Bumblebee mostly did away with this poor handling of the classic characters by having the robots not only physically resemble their most iconic selves but also act like them. This meant that -- with the strange exception of Blitzwing -- none of Transformers' most notable names were applied to unrelated characters.
However, that's sadly not the case with Rise of the Beasts from the sound of things. One of the new Autobots is Nightbird, who turns into a Nissan GT-R. The only notable Nightbird in the franchise was a non-transforming human-made robot. When she appeared in later iterations in a small role, she was associated with the Decepticons. Likewise, the GT-R, or at least a non-licensed version, was the alternate mode of the Autobot Drift in his first comics appearance. Keep in mind that the movie is set in the '90s, while the GT-R didn't debut until 2007.
The villain is Scourge, but he's clearly not the Generation 1 Sweep or the evil mirror of Optimus Prime from later continuities. Instead, he's the leader of the Terrorcons, who were a Generation 1 subgroup of Combiners that had nothing to do with Scourge. Conflicting reports also state that Nightbird is a Terrorcon. This makes it unclear if these villains are merely normal Decepticons by another name or monstrous beasts like the original team. All in all, Rise of the Beasts already sounds pumped, and Optimus Primed to disappoint both fans and critics, resulting in another swollen carcass of a film that just may destroy the cinematic Transformers once and for all.