BUMBLEBEE Now Being Positioned as a Soft Reboot of the TRANSFORMERS Universe

In the lead up to and the immediate aftermath of the release of Bumblebee, Paramount called it a sequel/prequel/middlequel(?). They had a lot invested in the 12-year, five movie Transformers franchise from director Michael Bay. But then Bumblebee came out and was really really successful, both critically and commercially (it is still in theaters), and someone at Paramount remembered their freshman Econ class and decided to ignore sunk costs. Transformer World went to the Hasbro panel at the New York Toy Fair and is reporting that Bumblebee was presented as a “new storytelling universe.”

There aren’t a lot of — or really any — details, but this makes a lot of sense. Transformers: The Last Knight was realeased only about 18 months ago and was the worst-performing film of the franchise, and while the movies have generally done well commercially, they are also extremely expensive to make. Bumblebee had about half the budget ($135 million) that The Last Knight did (about $217-260 million) and while it has lower grosses than The Last Knight ($458.9 million so far vs. $605.4 million), it has posted almost as much profit with much lower investment. Plus, the story was better. Using this as an opportunity to pivot the franchise toward smaller but better storylines seems like a great idea to me. What do you think?

Via: Comic Book Movie