‘Bumblebee’ Producer Says They’re Trying to Figure out Optimus Prime Solo Movie

Bumblebee gave a much smaller-scale look at the Transformers franchise, but it looks like that same formula might not be applied to another iconic character.

In a recent interview with Metro US, producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura was asked about rumblings about a potential Optimus Prime spinoff movie. As he had expressed in previous interviews, there’s a chance that the movie could happen, once they figure out exactly how it could work.

“We actually have an animated movie in the works that will tell the whole Cybertron mythology. The fans will love that,” Di Bonaventura teased. “We’re trying to figure out an [Optimus Prime solo movie].”

“It will be hard with Optimus, he is always right, very stoic and is a man of few words … It is kind of like saying, ‘Lets do a movie about Obi-Wan Kenobi?’” Di Bonaventura continued. “But how much is there to say about Obi-Wan? It is not so easy.”

Any shade towards the potential Obi-Wan spinoff aside, it sounds like Di Bonaventura has an interest in making an Optimus-centric story in one way or another.

“We hope so.” Di Bonaventura explained earlier this month. “Optimus Prime is a tricky one, because he’s so wise and smart, that it’s hard to decide how you can create an emotional story.”

Bumblebee sees the titular Autobot crash-landing on Earth in the 1980s while escaping the war on Cybertron, befriending a teenage girl named Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld) in the process. While the film isn’t entirely retconning the canon of the previous Transformers movies, it is mixing things up in one way or another.

“Reboot, I always hate that word because for one, I’m not sure I really understand what it means,” Di Bonaventura said in a previous interview. “We are going to do another big Transformers movie. It is going to be different than the ones that we’ve done before.”

“It’s not like we look at the elements of what we did before and go, ‘Well, let’s not do this’ or ‘Let’s not do that,’” Di Bonaventura explained. “It’s more about how do you evolve the experience for the fans. Let the fan have a new experience. When we did the first movie, at first there was a lot of pushback that we weren’t doing it the way it was done before,” he added. “My feeling was always that if we’d done it, you would’ve gone, ‘Well, I’ve already seen it.’ So how do you evolve things forward is I think the hardest thing because you’ve got to retain why people love it, but at the same time if you give them the same experience, they’re going to be bored with it.”

“I think we’ve learned something in this movie about tone that I would think the next big Transformers movie is going to have,” Di Bonaventura added. “It’s not like we’re going to copy it but we’ve learned something. There’s more freedom than I think we originally thought in terms of what we can do.”

Do you want to see an Optimus Prime spinoff movie? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Bumblebee is in theaters now.