Transformers Live-Action Movies

Entertainment Movies
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I personally wasn’t expecting TLK to be a masterpiece or amazing, but I still will admit to fondly remembering the hype train, and at least expecting it to be good by Michael Bay’s standards. It… wasn’t, but I was still able to enjoy it for the mess it was, and the handful of interesting ideas and good moments that were mostly lost in the shuffle. So for me it’s at least better than Age Of Extinction, which I just found fairly boring and at times irritating.

(But I am so very glad for the ■■■■■ in direction Bumblebee will hopefully have wrought. XD)

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662

I still want and don’t want to see bayformers unicron. It was an interesting setup even though I garentee prime did it better just going off bays track record.

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663

I now see why the movie arced sisters don’t combine in the movie. Not sure if this is a robot or a fatal traffic accident; I’m leaning towards traffic accident.

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664

Oh right

The combiner Arcee/Elita1/Chromia gimmick from the concepts and stuff

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I’d say that’s the result of shoving them all in a trash compactor. Or…something else that the mods probably won’t let me say.

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Yep. I like that they included it in the new toy but I see why it was scrapped. At least the other combiners in the movie looked like something.

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You know, earlier today, I was wondering something about Bumblebee. We all know the story of how they…ahem…transformed it into a semi-prequel, semi-reboot and then later started calling it a reboot. Apparently they were hoping that the movie would be successful so that they could use it as a springboard for a rebooted series. It turned out to be successful enough to warrant such a direction, whether you’re happy about that or not.

But what if it hadn’t been successful? What then?

I’m not trying to degrade Bumblebee or anything, I’m just asking a hypothetical question. The obvious answer might be that they’d end up saying, “eh, you know what, it is a prequel after all” and own up to their attempts at using it as a reboot. But what about the future of the franchise? Would they have tried to reboot it from the ground up? Would they have just continued the Bayverse, but with a different asthetic? Or would they have just stopped making Transformers movies altogether? What do you think?

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As much as some dislike it, movies have become the key to success for franchises now, as seen with the dying of comics and other media. Had bumblebee failed somehow(since it was highly unlikely in the first place), they would have tried harder to do it another time.

Least likely scenario would be to bring in a new director to hem the bayverse, which most people find unpopular atm, so I guess an entire reboot would have been warranted. Considering the current trend, they would still keep to a G1 aesthetic, unless they felt like making a different style, though they probably could have tried different stuff(IDK, Optimus having Cullen’s face as a robot, Grimlock being Texan, etc)

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I was personally always under the impression that if things did go pear-shaped, then they would just toss the movie onto the sinking ship of the bayverse and go ahead with a full hard reboot. They were plainly aware that the movies were tanking, hard, and Bumblebee was pretty much their last chance to claw back some tiny scrap of an audience before they admitted defeat and started entirely from scratch.

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670

Perhaps. But the thing is, having a G1 asthetic would be well-suited to a reboot. But if Bumblebee, a prequel to the Bayverse, already used the G1 designs, then they’d have to go a different route. Possibly Beast Wars?

Oh, wait.

But no matter what Hasbro says, I will still see Bumblebee as a prequel to the Bayverse while, at the same time. People like to compare Bumblebee to X-Men: First Class, in that it’s a soft reboot of the franchise. I have never seen any of the X-Men movies, so I have no idea exactly how First Class works. But from the context, I’m assuming it’s comparable to Bumblebee: half prequel, half reboot. The events in the movie can very well happen in both timelines, though the sequels to the movie ignore the events of previous movies. If that is the case with Bumblebee, then I can abide by it.

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672

I hope with beast wars they go with a t beast look yo the characters. The metal person with animal flesh just wouldn’t really look to great on screen; just look at transformers with tongues. Maybe make them full robot and use holograms / some tech to look organic in beast mode.

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I’m just curious to see how transformers will turn out with no humans.

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But then would it still be live-action? Or would they create everything, including the backgrounds, with CGI, like the live-action Lion King?

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Well they could have live animals, though considering the setting of BW, it might be weird

but hey there were protohumans in there so… humans in aboriginal or cavemen costumes?

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[shrugs] If it’s set in prehistoric times, then sure.

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True but in beasts wars the protohumans were barely in it and had very little character so unless the change it to somewhat modern you have a full movie with little to no non transformers,

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Obviously. But again, if the film had failed anyway then it wouldn’t exactly matter. There are still enough ties to the continuity of the bayverse that they could lump it in to wash their hands of the whole affair and start again from scratch (whatever that would’ve been - as you say, possibly beast wars) - regardless of the continuity errors and lack of consistency in style (since, well, the series is kind of infamous for its loose continuity anyway).

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To be fair, it can work. The Cybertron sequence in Bumblebee was entirely CGI and worked out fine; I think the key to avoid a repeat of the Lion King would just be to make sure the characters are properly expressive, in both beast and robot modes.

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In a word: good :stuck_out_tongue:

Look at the actual original beast wars, look at the latter day IDW comics (particularly lost light). Little to no humans, and they were great. In almost every story they appear in the humans are one of the weakest elements of the story (even in the cases where they’re just tolerable instead of outright bad), dragging everything else down because muh story surrogate, so they end up being obnoxious and getting under the big metal bois’ toes. Especially in the bayformers films, where most of what the humans contributed was gunshots and panicked screaming. Bumblebee is an exception of course, and a shockingly rare one at that. A film without them would be a blessing if you asked me.

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Still there’s another problem; not making the transformers the weak point. If the humans are the worst characters ussually without them the same problem could infect the transformers.

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I mean, theoretically, yes. In practicality, no. See, human characters in particular have a weird relationship with this franchise. They’ve been a part of the brand since day one, a way to make the autobots more relatable and approachable by having them befriend a human everyman audience surrogate. The problem that you run into is that humans are squishy and weak, particularly regular civilians, so in practise they tend to end up getting in the way of every encounter they’re involved in, and considering how often characters fight in transformers, it… becomes a problem.

Ontop of just the general pitfalls of character writing (which are slightly skewed anyway since generally in an attempt to appeal to children they come out… obnoxious, Sam and Miko meanwhile have no excuse, they’re just bad :stuck_out_tongue:), you have this initial inherent hurdle you have to go over, ie justifying their inclusion in the story at all beyond an initial audience surrogate, which leads to them getting a lot of screentime, which depending on the character can be anywhere from slightly irritating to single-handedly making the show unwatchable for some people.

With only transformers to work with, you essentially can just treat them as humans with extra bells and whistles now that they’re all generally on the same scale, which means you can just, like, tell a story. Will this always be a good story? Hell no, just look at those godawful machinama animations. But it’s no longer going to be dragged down by a tagged-on human subplot.

In the case of bayformers however, yes, they did make a huge mistake by putting so much focus on human characters, to the point where the actual transformers, you know, the thing people came to see, end up just being a pretty background feature that pop up now and then to spew some garbage dialogue and act like one-dimensional a-holes (then again, everyone in bayformers is a one-dimensional a-hole, but the transformers themselves are a particularly egregious example). If they tried to focus on those transformers without any humans? Yeah, that would just be a terrible movie. But I consider that more a fault of the writers for not really understanding what they were working with rather than an inherent flaw with the brand.

Bumblebee has demonstrated however that this new team is capable of actually writing the transformers as characters, so we should probably be fine. :stuck_out_tongue:

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