Is Transformers One a Prequel or Reboot? The Animated Movie's Origin Story Is Both, Director Says (Exclusive)

Is Transformers One a prequel to the live-action Transformers movies? Kind of.

By Cameron Bonomolo

Is Transformers One more than meets the eye? The first-ever fully CG-animated Transformers movie — which is set on the planet Cybertron and takes place long before the Great War between the Autobots and Decepticons — is an origin story for brothers-in-arms Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), better known as the future leaders of their respective Transformer factions: Optimus Prime and Megatron. But is the new movie (rolling out into theaters Sept. 20th) a prequel to the live-action Transformers films?

"Starting this as an origin story, it was great to go, 'Nothing's been done.' We've never seen this before," director Josh Cooley told ComicBook. "We've never started like this before. There's obviously a story of what we know will happen: a war will happen, and [the Autobots and Deceptions] will go to Earth. That's just part of Transformers. That's part of every version of Transformers that happens."

While that war eventually lands on Earth — as seen in 2007's Transformers and its 1987-set spinoff, 2018's live-action Bumblebee — this version of Transformers re-imagines events that have been depicted before across television, film, and comics, including 1986's Transformers: The Movie and the ongoing Energon Universe.

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"The thing I'm excited about moving forward is we can tell the same story and do things slightly differently, the way we started slightly differently," Cooley continued. "There's so many different continuities, it's just a huge sandbox. And so I think it's a prequel to the same type of events, but maybe in the future they're different."

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Added franchise producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who has produced every Transformers movie since 2007, "I think it'd be really hard and complicated to have a direct link [to the live-action movies]." Bonaventura explained that One will inform future Transformers movies — like the Hemsworth-fronted Transformers and G.I. Joe crossover — even if it exists in a separate continuity.

"Josh did such a great job in actualizing the characters in this movie, and it is going to have an impact on the live-action where we can't not meet that bar," di Bonaventura said. "It won't be necessarily literally a character or an event, but it has an effect on what we're gonna do." Between the animated and live-action films, "You want to do something different, and you also see where it can be successful. I think that's where the two universes help each other. You can see what works, and you can do that in either one. The fun of it for me, as a filmmaker, is keeping them separate."

Transformers One — also starring Scarlett Johansson as Elita-1, Keegan-Michael Key as Bumblebee, Steve Buscemi as Starscream, Jon Hamm as Sentinel Prime, and Laurence Fishburne as Alpha Trion — is only in theaters September 20th.

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