TRANSFORMERS ONE Producer on Replacing Peter Cullen with Chris Hemsworth for Optimus Prime
Transformers One does not look like it will be a good Transformers movie, but there is a lot of positive buzz surrounding it after a screening at the Annecy Animation Film Festival. To me, the movie just doesn’t feel like Transformers as the trailer shows off more of a silly and childish tone.
One of the other things that some fans have an issue with is replacing longtime Optimus Prime voice actor Peter Cullen with Chris Hemsworth. Producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura recently addressed the decision and explained why the change was needed.
While talking with Variety at the Annecy Animation Film Festival, he addressed the change, saying: "That was really important because, from a fan point of view, the original voice of Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen, is revered. To have somebody else voice Optimus Prime was like, 'Whoa, we better get this right.'"
He went on to say: "We couldn’t use Peter because the audience needs to feel the character’s youth. That’s why we pursued Chris. I was surprised, too, but not how funny Chris was.
“I’ve seen him in things where he was funny. But he has a very strong sense of story. That’s not true with every movie star."
Director Josh Cooley went on to talk about the rest of the cast, saying: "Yeah, we have an incredible cast. I can’t believe how great it was. Everybody was fantastic.
“I would walk them through the scene, and they’d suggest a lot of stuff. Keegan[-Michael Key], of course, rifted like crazy on things."
When talking about Hemworth specifically he said: "But Chris Hemsworth is also extremely funny. I was not prepared for how funny he is. A lot of his lines in this film are riffs off of what we had written, but he just brought his charisma and his comedy to it. He totally got it."
The thing is… Optimus Prime isn’t funny. This movie completely changes the personality of these characters and they don’t really represent who the characters are. That my biggest issue with what I’ve seen from the movie.
Yeah, the movie is titled Transformers, but these aren’t the characters that we’ve come to know and love over the years. This is something different and I don’t like the direction they are taking it or the tone.
This movie tells the “origin story of how the most iconic characters in the Transformers universe, Orion Pax and D-16, went from brothers-in-arms to become sworn enemies, Optimus Prime and Megatron.”
The film stars Hemsworth as Orion Pax / Optimus Prime, Brian Tyree Henry as D-16 / Megatron, Scarlett Johansson as Elita-1, and Keegan-Michael Key as B-127 / Bumblebee.
The producer also previously said: "This is … the origin story of young Megatron and young Optimus. If you know the origin, they started as friends, and over time things devolved for them and they ended up on two sides.
“So we're telling the young Optimus and the young Megatron story. We really are telling the origin story of all Transformers, both what they were at the beginning of it, to how they grow, to how they grow apart."
This will be the first of what Di Bonaventura calls a "natural trilogy,” and it’s going to explore “Cybertron in a way you've never seen it, that no one's ever seen it before.”
Transformers One arrives in theaters on September 20.