Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts is coming

The Transformers movies are coming with Rise Of The Beasts, a prequel drawing inspiration from the Transformers show Beast Wars.

The Transformers movies started way back in 2007, when Michael Bay whisked us off to a world inhabited by giant robots that turned into cars and where anything could explode at any moment. The franchise rose and fell over the next decade and change, with Bay exiting after 2017s disappointing Transformers: The Last Knight and the series getting some new energy with 2018’s Bumblebee, a prequel that sidestepped the Bay stuff.

Now, The A.V. Club reports that another new Transformers movie is coming, this one based on the mid-90s cartoon Beast Wars: Transformers, which followed up on the original series from the ’80s. Instead of cars, the robots in Beast Wars transform into animals. So you’ve got Airazor who turns into a hawk; Rhinox who turns into a rhino; and Optimus Primal who turns into a gorilla. The lot of them will be the big new draw in Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, which you can see the brand new trailer for below:

Rise of the Beasts will again be a prequel, set after Bumblebee but before Bay’s first Transformers movie, in 1994. The film will mostly take place in Brooklyn and Peru, where the crew will apparently film at the ancient mountain city of Machu Picchu.

But the Beasts aren’t the only draw here. Director Steven Caple Jr. said that Optimus Prime, who turns into a big ‘ol truck, will be the “robot lead” of the movie, with actor Peter Cullen returning to voice him. Optimus Prime will come to adopt Earth as his home, perhaps over the course of “philosophical conversations” with Optimus Primal, whose been on the planet for a long time already.

The movie will bring in the two factions from the Beast Wars show: the Maximals and the Predacons, as well as feature Autobots we already know and a faction of Decepticons known as Terrorcons, named so there’s no confusion over whether they’re the bad guys. And there’ll be a couple of humans around, which is fine, I guess, including In The Heights star Anthony Ramos and Judas and the Black Messiah alum Dominique Fishback. He plays an ex-military guy named Noah who takes care of this family in Brooklyn and she plays a museum employee named Elena who’s underappreciated by her boss. And then the transforming robots show up.

Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts is out in theaters on June 9, 2023

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