‘Bumblebee’ Almost Included a G1 Version of Megatron

When Bumblebee landed in theaters last year, it brought some fan-favorite iterations of the Transformers to a whole new generation. Based off of new comments from the film’s director, that mindset was almost taken a step further.

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Bumblebee director Travis Knight spoke about the film’s opening sequence on Cybertron, which picked up in the middle of a gnarly fight between the Autobots and the Decepticons. As Knight revealed, the scene almost included an ’80s iteration of Megatron, who would have made his presence more than known in that sequence.

“I had this whole thing that I boarded out myself where I had Megatron in there,” Knight revealed. “He comes into the scene just absolutely leveling sh—, just laying waste to everything in his path like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings..”

“We had a [new] design and a partial build and everything,” Knight continued. “I was so excited, I couldn’t wait to do it, but then as we started going through, it was going to be too expensive and really did fly in the face of continuity with the [Michael] Bay films. But let’s be honest, I’m sure they have a fleeting sense of continuity themselves.”

“[It] created issues for people who were unfamiliar with the franchise,” Knight added. “I wanted to make sure this film was a tribute to the live-action films as well as the cartoon, that there were layers of enjoyment for fans of both.”

Even though Megatron didn’t make his way into the film’s opening sequence, Knight did toy with the possibility of having him be in the background of some later scenes.

“We even caught a glimpse of him in the outside the war room, where the Sector 7 guys are wondering what they should do with these Decepticons,” Knight explained. “There were a couple shots were we just caught a fleeting glimpse of a frozen Megatron in the background.”

Even though fans didn’t get to see the classic version of Megatron, Bumblebee did include a lot of subtle homages to the Gen-1 era of the franchise, the spirit of which is expected to continue going forward.

“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,’” producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura explained in a previous interview. “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.”

Would you have wanted to see a Gen-1 version of Megatron in Bumblebee? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Bumblebee is now available on Digital HD, Blu-ray, and DVD.