The continuity wholes between '07 and RotF were really minimal, and seeing that RotF isn’t happening right after the first movie, they are excusable.
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You mean like all the transformers hanging about in Earth’s past which didn’t do a thing about the Allspark?
Just like Optimus Prime himself didn’t knew about the location of the AllSpark, maybe they didn’t knew about it either.
Maybe, I dunno. Quite a while passed since the last time I’ve seen RotF.
Optimus Prime came to Earth because of the Allspark. Bumblebee confirmed it was here and called the other Autobots. Surely any of those other guys who were screwing around here for seemingly no reason while there was a war on could’ve done the exact same thing.
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But he didn’t knew exactly where it was. This is why he needed Sam’s glasses.
Well let’s see: Bumblebee discovered that the AllSpark was on Earth because of… oh, it’s so hard to remember the Bayverse’s continuity! Because he found out via the… internet (?) that Sam’s glasses could lead to the AllSpark. If this is how he found out (excuse me if I am in the wrong), then all of the older bots would have not been able to do such a discovery.
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Alright, you’ve got me there. Touche 
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Tho who knows? Maybe they found something. If not the AllSpark, maybe something else. With the Bayverse continuity, there are a lot of things that you can find on Earth. This is why I am saying that there is still a lot that can be done with this universe, and why I don’t want to see it dead.
Speaking of which, are the IDW Bayverse comics still a thing?
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I feel like that’s part of the problem, rather than a talking point. After a while it just becomes ridiculous.
I mean, there was that Bumblebee tie-in comic which got hilariously decanonized in the context of the actual film, but other than that… not to my knowledge. There was some attempt to tie everything together before dark of the moon came out, but after that they just sort of gave up as far as I can tell.
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But if you give him the proper time, the proper attention, and the proper people to try to fill in all the cracks with things that make sense, then it would at the very least be somewhat better.
Oh…
I need more IDW continuities. The 2005 one is awesome so far. The 2019 seems to be just a clone of the '05 one.
I guess I really just don’t care at this point. I’d rather just move on and start from a new foundation rather than try and frankenstein this mess of a continuity for a second time.
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As much as I respect your points, as a Bayverse fan who was looking forward to a prequel, I don’t have the best taste in my mouth from this. I’m honestly willing to forgive the shoddy continuity, because like you said, the Bayverse has always been lax about that. But what you said about those story elements being homages to the originals…uh, no. Having Bumblebee lose his voice, and turn into a Camaro, and the fact that Megatron’s frozen in ice…those are products of a prequel. There’s no excuse.
Not that your Spider-Man point is a bad one, but here’s the thing: Bumblebee was announced and talked about as a prequel for AGES before it came out, so by this point, it’s ingrained in people’s minds that it’s a prequel. So for the studio to come out and say that it’s a reboot feels wrong to me.
Let’s say Abe Lincoln was preparing the Gettysburg Address as a means of honoring fallen soldiers and spreading the word to everyone he knew. Then he gave the speech and succeeded in his goal. Then, while everyone was patting him on the back, he said, “Actually, that speech was all about abolishing slavery. It had nothing to do with honoring dead soldiers, and everything I said before was baloney.” Does that sound awesome and refreshing to you? Because that’s how I feel about this situation.
Of course. It’s an unfortunate side effect of the film starting out as one but being changed last minute.
And of course, from what we’ve seen (or rather not seen), Megatron isn’t mentioned at all in Bee and so that doesn’t confirm or deny that he’s already been to Earth given that the deleted scene he was in didn’t even make it to the home media release. So as far as the film is concerned, Megatron is possibly kicking tailpipe at ‘the Capital’ on Cybertron given that Arcee lost contact with them and not spending time as an overgrown icicle in Nevada.
If Megatron had been seen frozen in the movie, I’d agree with you.However, since it and many other continuity tie ins to the Bay films outside of more obvious ones (like the lack of voice and camaro, but those were so central to the plot they were impossible to rewrite) were left out, it makes it harder to connect it to that other continuity, especially since if we are still considering this a prequel, Bee is supposed to have been on Earth since WWII but he doesn’t show up until 1987.
This is such a large disregard to continuity that it makes it impossible to see it in the same universe. You could argue that Bee had been to Earth, left, and then returns, but that’s needless gymnastics to try and connect them. of course considering the gymnastics that are needed to tie the previous five films into one another, this may not be completely out of character, lol
And as for it being a prequel being ingrained into people, I point back to my previous post. If the next film comes out and continues to blatantly disregard the Bayverse continuity and its good, people will shrug their shoulders and know we’re in a reboot. If this new reboot gamble pays off and we get lots of good movies out of it, complaining about Bumblebee not being true to its more prequel type roots isn’t going to matter in the long run.
Especially since it seems like Paramount is specifically wanting to make a sequel to Bumblebee considering its modest budget and good word of mouth. If that film were to be the reboot, the studio would lose out on an easily marketable situation in which they can take advantage of the first movie’s good will in making their sequel.
The prior Transformers sequels were all marketed the exact same way down to the TV spots with the exact same Epic Voice Guy in which I’m not really sure he recorded new VO for each film. To the studio and advertisers, they were Michael Bay films first and foremost, and they just happened to have toys attached to them, to which Paramount made no money off of but Hasbro did. Until The Last Knight, this was a lucrative partnership that worked very well. (and even then it’s well documented that Hasbro wasn’t always happy with the reception of the films and wanted more creative control, now they’ve got it) After The Last Knight, it was no longer working and they renegotiated. While Bumblebee wasn’t as big a success commercially, critically it was much better. Both Paramount and Hasbro are going to go where the money is, in this instance, it’s ditching the dead weight (Bay as a director and his universe) and going with what made Bee as successful as it was: good writing, characterization, and a much simpler story. Considering the mess that is the Bayverse continuity, it’s easier to jettison the entire thing and think of Bumblebee as the start of a new but similar universe.
Ironically, what you’re worried about potentially confusing audiences is exactly the reason its rebooting in the first place. It’s rebooting because people liked the film that was as loosely connected to the other films as possible and was even a quasi-reboot itself more than any other film since probably the original 2007 release. Is it unfortunate that they’re having to throw away a decade’s worth of stories and leave a universe on a cliffhanger? One hundred percent yes. I’m not sure you should blame Bumblebee for being the start of a reboot, you should blame The Last Knight for forcing Bee to feel the need to reboot in the first place.
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It’s not our fault no one liked transformers 4+5. Yes it started as a prequel but guess what; the reason it’s now a reboot is becuase bay screwed up the story so bad I’m sure they had no idea what to include to begin with.
Bumblebee arrived in the 80s; what about ww2?
Blitzwing ripped out his voice; I thought I was megatron.
The auto bots arrived after bee sent a signal; then who was that Optimus at the end of bumblebee?
Transformers being a S7 secret; so what about john Cenas character and his squad?
In short; it’d be an insult to the bumblebee movie if it was a prequel to such an overly sexy, violent, explosive mess of a series.
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“Awesome! Yay! This movie is the start to something new! These new movies are gonna be awesome!” says everybody…except the Bayverse fans.
Going back to the Spider-Man point, I felt similar feelings of disappointment, sadness, and even mild frustration when The Amazing Spider-Man series was cancelled after the second movie left so many loose ends. Even to this day, I still wish that they would tie up those loose ends. But since Spider-Man came to the MCU, things have been great. Homecoming and Far From Home were even better than TASM, and we got to see Spider-Man in several crossover movies (plus, there’s a rumor he’s gonna be in a Captain Marvel team-up movie).
So for all I know, this new reboot that’s supposedly coming in 2021 will be a similar case. I have never said I think it’ll be bad. In fact, chances are, I will see it if the rumors are true. And despite everything I’ve said, Bumblebee is objectively a good movie. All this prequel-reboot controversy has somewhat tarnished my vision of it, but it still has its good points. And it has enough that it can still work as a prequel (which is probably what the studio had in mind when they were retooling it).
But back to the original point. To promise us a prequel, deliver that prequel, and then go back and claim that it’s a reboot instead, feels like a big middle finger to us Bayverse fans. Sure, there’s the whole deal about wanting to turn people on to more Transformers movies, but there are still a lot of Bayverse fans out there who are alienated by this. And just because people will be okay with this reboot going forward, it doesn’t mean there was never any controversy in the first place. The official Transformers wiki still lists Bumblebee as a prequel to the Bayverse (don’t believe me? Bumblebee (film) - Transformers Wiki ). Really, they’ve dug their own hole.
Sure, there are these reasons for this issue supposedly being okay. But making claims about your work after you’ve released it, saying that this or that thing is actually very different than it is, is still wrong. I mean, look at J. K. Rowling. In recent years, she’s been going around claiming that this girl was actually black, and that guy was homosexual the whole time, and these guys were actually not allied with the D. A, or whatever. She’s only doing that because she wants to stay relevant-and when you think about it, that’s kind of what Transformers is doing right now. They want to stay relevant, so they’re openly contradicting things they have said before.
The truth is, at the end of the day, a reboot is still the best way for the franchise to get back on track after TLK was a failure in the box office. That story is unresolved, but the cliffhanger existed only in the form of a mid-credits scene. If it wasn’t for that, then the movie would’ve felt more like the end of its own story. But of course, the prequel Bumblebee was still being made. And as this discussion should prove, changing it to a reboot at the last minute doesn’t go over well with everyone. So these are the possibilities that wouldn’t cause any problems:
1.) Don’t do anything, leave Bumblebee as a prequel, and just stop making Transformers movies altogether.
2.) Cancel Bumblebee altogether (this would be the worst option, because by the time TLK came out, they had already started filming it, and had spent a bunch of money on it).
3.) Keep Bumblebee as a prequel, and then say something like “Oh, you like this movie? Well, good news. In a few years, we’re gonna reboot this entire franchise, with the same director that made this movie you liked!”
4.) This one is weird, but it might work better than any of the above points. State that Bumblebee is both a prequel and a reboot at the same time. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, so hear me out. I’m only really in the Bayverse fandom, but from what I’ve read, every Transformers continuity (G1, Animated, Prime, etc.) exists within a multiverse, sort of like Into The Spider-Verse. This means that each reality has its own timeline. So perhaps Bumblebee could be a situation where the Bayverse’s timeline and the reboot’s timeline spliced together. In other words, the events of Bumblebee happened in both timelines, but at the end of the movie, the timelines branched off again. This is why there are elements of both timelines in the movie.
I think the last one is the one that would work best. It would give us Bayverse fans the prequel we want, while also letting the franchise reboot itself.
I am a Bayverse fan.
But I am also a Travisverse fan.
It would totally demolish the already weak Bayverse continuity.
What JK Rowling is doing is a completely different thing that Hasbro rebooting the movie universe.
I am pretty sure that the idea of it being a reboot has been brought up around halfway into its production.
This, by default, is a big no.
There is a sequel in the making.
That would still demolish the Bayverse, plus it wouldn’t make any sense.
- Don’t change anything, just like ~80% of the entire TF community wants.
This is one of the very few situations when a company actually pleased most of the fans. They will not change it all for the smallest minority.
Why are you using the “us vs them” mentality so much? You do realise that not all Bayverse fans are on your side, right?
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Yeah, and? The Bayverse continuity has always been weak, as you said in a previous post. Heck, YOU said that it’s possible that the Autobots kept jumping to and from Earth for their various reasons (first the regrouping in BB, then the Allspark search, then the WW2 stuff).
How so? In both cases, the creator puts out a product, and amidst all the praise, the creator comes out and says that the product is actually different from what we read (e. g. in the Harry Potter novels, there was no hint whatsoever of Dumbledore being homosexual, and yet J. K. Rowling claims that he was). It is a sad truth that many artists wish they could do something different in their work and wish they could make changes to the work they’ve already put out. Then again, releasing different versions of your work is a surefire way to make people mad (ask anyone in the Star Wars fandom).
Which brings me to some more confusion: when did they start having this reboot mentality, anyway? The rumors didn’t start till, like, a month or two before the movie came out. I’m not a huge expert on filmmaking, but I’m pretty sure it takes longer than that to redo all the CGI and render it to look like G1.
Uh, yeah…that’s why I came up with the following points.
I meant cancelling the BB movie. Which, again, is not an option-they had already spent so much money on it.
“Most” does not equal “all.”
My original question was “Am I the only one who’s against Paramount’s announcement that they’re turning Bumblebee into a reboot instead of a prequel?” The answer seems to be a “yes.” But when I talked about controversy in my last post, I was more referring to the prequel vs. reboot confusion. Admittedly, I haven’t seen that many people that are mad about this the way I am, but still.
Which is why I think my fourth point would be the best thing they can do to please 100% of the fanbase as opposed to 80%. If they say that the movie is both a prequel and a reboot at the same time, then that’ll solve everything. They can still use the movie as a launching pad for a rebooted series, and the G1 fans will be happy that the characters will continue to look like their G1 counterparts. Well, that and the more humanized stories and characters. Those can be enjoyed by Bayverse fans, too. Meanwhile, the Bayverse fans will still have their prequel. Boom, everyone wins.
Of course, there’s still the unresolved issue of the Bayverse ending on a cliffhanger. But there’s nothing Bumblebee can do to solve that problem.
And it would turn it from a bad franchise to a miserable one.
It was pretty coherent till AoE.
No, I stated that it has so many plotwholes that it’s a lot of storytelling potential to try to fill those plotwholes.
However, all of these plotwholes were mostly created by AoE and TLK, which is the opposite of “the continuity always being weak”.
I never said that.
In fact this is one of the reasons I want Bumblebee to be its own thing: it doesn’t make any sense.
Hasbro is not foing it out of dispair for relevance. Transformers has always been relevant.
JK Rowling made the changes years after she published the last book.
Hasbro teased the idea that Bumblebee was a reboot before it was even released.
Meanwhile the fact that Bumblebee is a reboot is obviously pointed out in the movie.
Again: around halfway into its production.
They started from the moment we saw the Cybertron trailer, which was earlier.
Some even started speculating when they saw Blitzwing in the very first trailer.
The characters were looking G1 from the very beginning. The major difference between the initial draft and the post reboot draft was the Cybertron scene.
Nobody will ever please everybody.
But when a company pleases such a big majority, the minority would and should be ignored.
This doesn’t answer the fact that you assume that ever real Bayverse fan has to be on your side and your side only.
It would create unecesary confusion.
The G1 fans don’t like Bumblebee just because the characters look G1.
…beeefore the entire universe getting axed anyway.
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I thought my wording was quite clear that I knew that.
No it wouldn’t. They’d just say, “This movie is canon to both this series and this series.” Simple enough.
Oops, my bad. I didn’t realize I was responding to a different user.
[quote=“Toa_Vladin, post:637, topic:19445”]
Hasbro is not foing it out of dispair for relevance. Transformers has always been relevant. [/quote]
Yes they are. They’re doing it because they want to keep their relevance.
Maybe I should elaborate on my point. Hasbro dropped only subtle hints that Bumblebee might end up being a reboot while they were still working on it. They continued marketing it as a prequel, what with the “Every hero has a beginning” tagline. Then, when they decided it was a financial success, they declared it a reboot. AFTER it was released. Likewise, J. K. Rowling declared Dumbledore to be homosexual AFTER she had published the last book (well, technically not last, what with Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts, but that’s another story).
This is a perfect transition into something I realized when I read your response to my last post. I failed to think of a fifth option that Paramount/Hasbro could do to please both the Bayverse fans and the other Transformers fans. What they could’ve done was, right when they came up with the idea to retool Bumblebee into a reboot, they made a public announcement. They could’ve been like, “Hey, our franchise is screwed big-time, and we don’t think this prequel can save it. So the best thing we can do for ourselves and the franchise is to reboot it. But we can’t give up on this movie that we’ve already spent a bunch of money on, so we’re gonna rework it into a reboot.” Considering that a good deal of Bayverse fans were okay with what actually happened, I think they would’ve been pretty forgiving of this. I mean, The Last Knight ended on a cliffhanger that only a sequel could’ve patched up. What could a prequel possibly do to do that? Except set up a plot point for the next sequel, that is. Ultimately, it would still be disappointing that the Bayverse would be resting in a grave, but if it went this way, then Hasbro and Paramount wouldn’t have screwed things up by saying that their already-released prequel was actually a reboot.
This is what actually hit me the hardest. First of all, the argument “it’s impossible to please everybody” is fundamentally weak. With all due respect, it makes you sound like an apologist. Let me just say, if I had a dollar for every time I heard a Star Wars apologist use that argument and then receive backlash for it, I’d be able to provide funding for a sequel to TLK.
Second of all, you’re basically saying that since I’m the only one who thinks this, then I should shut up because they’re not gonna listen to me. Well, I’m sorry, but I’ve been depressed about this for months. If it’s wrong for me to have my own personal opinions about things that I like (or dislike), then…well…I cannot think of anything to say.
This is the crux of the matter. Unfortunately, there’s not really such a thing as a Bayverse fan anymore. I’ve been a staunch defender of the first four films (especially AoE) despite their various faults but TLK finally killed any enthusiasm I had for a positive future for the franchise. And this is coming from ME. It’s too bad for sure, as the first film is the reason I even got into Transformers to begin with, but one of the best things about it is that its constantly rebooting itself. G1 ends we get Beast Wars. Beast Wars (and Machines) ends and we get the Unicron Trilogy. The movies start and almost simultaneously Animated starts. As the movies are ongoing we get Prime and Robots in Disguise 2015 after that. And when all of THIS is going on, IDW is cranking out comics that are getting great reception from fans.
But where other aspects of the overall franchise maybe ended at the right time (Animated especially, the stuff the creators were talking about doing with Season 4 sounds awful), the movies helmed by Bay obviously outstayed their welcome. If the stories had been better and critics had been at the very least apathetic towards them instead of vitriolic then we’d be in a different place, but every time a new one came out people would call it one of the worst movies of that given year. That’s bad enough for a film franchise to have a negative stigma against it, but it’s also a toy franchise meant for kids. The box office of TLK proved that there isn’t a large enough dedicated fanbase of Transformers fans to have kept the Bay films going the way they were once the general audience called it quits on the franchise. G1 fans quit torturing themselves to watch a movie they knew they’d hate, which meant less money compared to previous entries, and the movie fans that DID show up didn’t show up enough to justify a sequel. We’re actually lucky that Bumblebee was already as far along in development as it was, because the studio considered scrapping the entire project.
It becomes less about pleasing everyone and more about just trying to make money. If more people want a rebooted Transformers film verse using Bumblebee as a spring board than want a sixth Bayverse film to wrap up the story, then that’s the direction Paramount and Hasbro will go in. It’s literally not personal, it’s strictly business.
Don’t be. The quality of product that we were getting doesn’t warrant such strong an emotion. At their core the Transformers films were a nostalgic cash cow meant to make money and nothing else. We can at least be thankful that it seemed Michael Bay and the crew had fun making them at least, as there is an evident energy in every single one of the films he made for the franchise. It might not have made good movies, but at least he got to have fun along the way. The studio obviously didn’t care considering they pulled the plug the moment they stopped making money. TLK was the last shot at a course correction for the Bayverse and they sunk it like the Titanic. While its disappointing to leave things on a cliffhanger, the reboot route Bumblebee took has arguably given the films a brighter future than they ever had under Bay’s direction. People are excited to see what comes next and don’t know what to expect. We knew what we would get walking into theaters to watch TF2 or 3 or 4 or 5. We’d get Bayhem and hopefully enough of a semblance of a good story to keep us entertained for upwards of three hours.
At the end of the day, it’s going to be best to think back on the fond memories we may or may not have had with the Bayverse and hope for the best when it comes to the future. It’s not an end per se, but merely another transformation for the franchise. And who’s to say we HAVE actually heard the last of this timeline? In the years to come, if enough people come out of the woodwork with nostalgic memories of the Bayverse, maybe we’ll get an IDW comic series or something to give us closure on the story the way we’ve had sprinklings of Animated content through the years? Stuff like that has happened before. But sometimes you need a Batman & Robin before you can get a Dark Knight.
I’d argue Age of Extinction is actually the least notorious of the sequels when it comes to the rewriting history gimmick. Movie 2 pushes the idea of humanity/Cybertronian crossover further with the Harvester and Seekers, adding a slight headscratcher as to why none of them bothered trying to find the All Spark. That can easily be explained that it was never their mission to find it and so ignored it, or they were trying to find it in conjunction with the Harvester but never did because Sector 7 already covered it up.
Movie 3 is worse implying that the whole idea to come to Earth was deliberate thanks to Megs and Sentinel trying to team up and double cross Optimus. How does The Fallen play into this? Did Sentinel order the All Spark to be launched at Earth or did Optimus? We know Bay never cared about keeping to the expanded material continuity the comics introduced, so we might as well ignore everything they told us. And the plan that Carly is told by Gould is that it seems like it was ALWAYS the plan the use Humanity as a slave labor force but that can’t have been because by what Sector 7 told Sam in the first film is that the All Spark landed on Earth before humanity was even around (not to mention this being another problem with ROTF’s plot but I digress). So was Earth just going to be a meet up spot for Megs and Sentinel? Was the Fallen going to join them but he crashed on one of Jupiter’s moons like we see in ROTF? It raises too many questions that need to be ignored in order for the movie to be enjoyed fully… but when you do it might be the best of the original three just because pure spectacle.
Movie 5 is a giant contradiction in of itself because of how much it retcons and rewrites, making literally everything a minefield of contradictions, least of all the BZ-7 and B127 naming thing which is another reason why Bumblebee works best as a reboot and not part of the Bayverse.
The most egregious thing that Movie 4 introduces is the idea of the creators strip mining Earth with bombs to create the Transformers and killing the dinosaurs, once again seeming to contradict when the All Spark landed on Earth to begin with. Or maybe not. Both events happened SO long ago that its hard to keep track. Everything with the Knights and Creators introduced was interesting and non-contradicting thanks to the fact that its implied to have happened pre-war on Cybertron. Would’ve been a potential cool way to help explain away the Optimus/Megatron/Sentinel/Fallen connection thing from ROTF/DOTM in Movie 5, but instead TLK contradicts even this by making the Knights of Iacon a giant dragon combiner (which is admittedly cool) and HAVE THEM ON EARTH TOO to the point where its unlikely that Optimus could have at one point been part of their ranks, not to mention the Dinobots. Then there’s the discrepancy between “the Creators” and Quintessa “the Creator” singular. Did she hire Lockdown? If she did, why did he keep saying Creators? Did she trick him? Did aliens hire Lockdown and then she killed them and usurped their plan?
I try to make sense of this (and did a fairly good job IMO) awhile ago if anyone cares to scroll upwards back to July of 2017, lol. So Age of Extinction really only becomes problematic to the “plot” of the series as a whole retroactively thanks to The Last Knight not being consistent with what was set up in the previous movie. People like to say The Last Jedi what was with big movies in 2017 having “The Last IMPORTANT THING” in their title? XD ignored the set up provided in The Force Awakens and that ruined that movie. It didn’t, but if people really think that, then boy oh boy they don’t need to look at The Last Knight too hard because it actually does ignore the set up from a previous movie.
But that’s probably not an argument for this topic. 
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…
which would create confusion
They were always relevant.
It wasn’t motivated entirely by the money. Again: they were thinking at it halfway through. The money were only the final catalyst.
Sigh…
Rowling declared that Dumbledore is a gay years after the last book got released. I fully agree that she did so to stay relevant but you forget one crucial thing: Harry Potter is everything for Rowling.
The TF movies are nothing for Hasbro. Look at how many tf franchises are running in the same time: Travisverse, Cyberverse, WfC, IDW, Aligned, all going well with their respective targeted audiences. Do you really think that Transformers is “irrelevant” nowadays? No. It is the robot franchise. Everybody knows what a transformer is. Transformers is anything but irrelevant. Hasbro could completely shut off the movies and TF would still be famous as hell.
You can’t please everybody.
Mate, rumors of them thinking to reboot it were coming months before the release. They don’t have to explain us their directorial choices. They don’t own us anything. [quote=“thewimpykid, post:638, topic:19445”]
screwed things up
[/quote]
Isn’t it weird that nobody else says that they “screwed things up”?
It’s so easy to say that as a dissapointed consumer. Please, if you really think you would be better as the big boss of a multi-million dollars franchise company, and that you think you can please millions of people with their own lives, tastes, preferences, wishes, passions, each different of the other, each unique, each wanting their own movie, if you really think that you can please millions of individual souls, go ahead. But from my own experience I say that you can’t do such thing, and that you are talking about a power and a responsability that you haven’t experienced.
Of course they get backlash. The ones against the “apologist” are usually brash and violent fans like that “I want Sanchez sauce!” fan of R&M.
I literally never said that.