Live-action film series

The live-action film series is an umbrella term that refers to the series of highly-successful theatrical feature films put out by Paramount Pictures beginning in 2007, along with the vast amount of toys, merchandise, and ancillary fiction created for it. The first five films in the series were directed by Michael Bay, and began with Transformers. The first of the sequels, titled Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, was released on June 24, 2009. The third film, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, was released on June 28, 2011. Though Bay claimed he would not be back for the fourth film, he was successfully lured back to the director's chair and Transformers: Age of Extinction was released on June 27, 2014. A fifth film, Transformers: The Last Knight, was released on June 21, 2017.

The Last Knight proved to be a box office disappointment; despite this, Bumblebee, a spinoff title set in the 1980s, was released in December 21, 2018 and met with better critical and financial reception. What exactly this means is still unclear for the live-action universe; a new trilogy of films is in the works, beginning with 2023's Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,^[1] though outside of some vague statements Hasbro has remained mum on whether these new films will continue the story of the previous films or function as a reboot.^[2]

In 2015, the studio hired Akiva Goldsman to oversee writing a series of spin-offs with Bay and producers Steven Spielberg and Lorenzo di Bonaventura.^[3] Goldsman gathered together writers Robert Kirkman, Zak Penn, Jeff Pinkner, Steven DeKnight, Ken Nolan, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Christina Hodson, and Lindsey Beer.^{[4][5][6][7][8]} Of the nine proposed spin-offs, Spielberg saw potential in five of them, including an animated prequel set on Cybertron written by Barrer and Ferrari, eventually released in 2024 as Transformers One.^[9] Kirkman departed after one day because of health problems,^[10] and on August 2, 2017, after The Last Knight's disappointing performance, Goldsman also left the writer's room. ^[11]

For many years, there were talks of spinning the Transformers films off into a shared universe based on multiple Hasbro properties, including the concurrently-released G.I. Joe films, though the failure of the 2012 Battleship film caused these plans to be put on hold. However, in 2023, Rise of the Beasts ended with the surprise twist of its main human hero being invited to become one of the Joes, laying the groundwork for the two franchises to finally be brought together on screen. Indeed, Hasbro and Paramount have announced plans for a full Transformers/G.I. Joe crossover film, written by Derek Connolly and set for release in 2026, though few other details are currently known.^[12][13]

The film series is partly responsible for the Chinese market's increasing domination of the US film industry: the first film made a then-whopping $37m there, attracting attention to the market and the local industry. Over the ten years since, the franchise made more and more in China, attracting more and more other companies to the market, and delaying The Last Knight caused a massive reduction of growth there! ^[14]

Continuities

See also: Movie continuity family

The live-action film series is a continuity family, and as such includes all continuities concerning closely related characters and settings. TFWiki has identified four primary timelines for the series:

• The main movie timeline consisting of the films themselves.
• The secondary Movie expanded universe timeline consisting of the first three films, along with several IDW-published novels, comic books and various other elements that don't contradict each other.
• The Titan Magazines movie timeline, which began tying into the larger film-based continuity by IDW but eventually gave up. This continuity also follows events in a splinter timeline where Megatron won the battle of Mission City.
• The Sector Seven ARG timeline where the film series is a fictionalization of real events.

Micro-continuities also exist in the form of video games, some toy bios, and certain comic story threads that are incompatible with each other. The Transcendent Technomorphs refer to this continuity family as the Tyran universal streams.

Notes

• The live-action film series has thus far consistently used the code name "E7" for direction signs on all the movies' sets, as well as in various internal documents and files. More specifically, Revenge of the Fallen was code-named "E7²", Dark of the Moon was "E73", Age of Extinction was "E74", and The Last Knight was "E75". Why this ruse is being held up is anyone's guess; it's not like anybody should be fooled by this anymore in the internet age!
• Some proposals for spin-off films revolved around settings like Ancient Rome and Feudal Japan.^[15]

References

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