ANT-MAN Writers To Script TRANSFORMERS Prequel and Michael Bay May Return For Another Sequel

I used to be a Michael Bay apologist. I appreciate his unique skill set, I'd go to bat for films like The Rock and Armageddon (despite its recent Honest Trailer), and I thought Pain & Gain was excellent. But his involvement with the Transformers franchise, though certainly lucrative for Bay personally and for Paramount Pictures, has made me pump the brakes on defending him. And now it appears that even though he said Transformers: Age of Extinction was going to be his final Transformers movie, he may be coming back for Transformers 5.

Deadline brings word that writers Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari, who did production rewrites of Marvel's Ant-Man, have been hired to write Transformers One, a film intended to be a prequel that takes place on the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron. Apparently this could end up being an animated movie, but the duo is supposedly joining the recently-formed writers' room with the expectation that they'll write a live-action Transformers movie as well.

The report also indicates that the studio's plan is to have a live-action sequel ready for when Bay returns from directing his Benghazi movie 13 Hours, with the implication being that he'd slide into the director's chair of Transformers 5 as soon as possible. While this isn't 100% confirmed yet, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it happened. All of this being said, The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman is now among those in the Transformers Cinematic Universe's writers' room, so here's hoping he's able to do something to increase the quality of the scripts moving forward.