New ‘Transformers’ Movies Coming in 2017, 2018 and 2019
Hasbro executives threatened announced today that new entries in the Transformers franchise would be coming in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Part of a planned twelve-film franchise, these three films will expand the pre-existing cinematic universe of the shape-shifting robot toys while simultaneously redefining how big of a number twelve feels like.
More specifically, Hasbro clarified that both Age of Extinction star Mark Wahlberg and director Bay would return for the fifth installment slated for 2017 and that it would continue the mythology of the preceding films, but that the 2018 film would be more of an origin story for the character of Bumblebee, outlining whatever series of poor decisions that left an unthinkably powerful intergalactic robot under the command of a teenage Shia LaBeouf. The 2019 film will return to the main timeline and continue where the 2017 left off, though by that point, all emotional damage will have already been done.
Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise has become Exhibit A for cultural doomsayers, its massive box-office draws in spite of the movies’ objective badness a clear and indisputable indicator that Americans are stoopid and dum. This isn’t quite fair — for a movie to make upwards of $700 million, someone has to have done something clever, or at least coldly exacting — but it’s true that Bay’s metallic-CGI gangbangs represent a particular strain of noisy blockbuster bluster that inspires dread in those who spend their leisure time pondering Where This Is All Going. And this new report from Bloomberg Business on the three Transformers sequels this morning indicates that the self-appointed guardians of American cinema’s artistic integrity will have three new hills to die upon in the years to come.
This represents but a single front of Hasbro’s all-out assault on the nation’s multiplexes, with the toy company’s other properties soon to follow. The Bloomberg item makes mention of an impending My Little Pony feature film set for release in 2017, the midnight release of which will undoubtedly double as an all-you-can-mock buffet for Triumph the Comic Insult Dog. This is Hasbro’s world, and we’re just begrudgingly buying movie tickets in it. It’ll be a long, long time before we have to live in a Transformer-less world again.