New Transformers Movie Finally Gets an Update After Three-Year-Old Cliffhanger Ending

Paramount’s new leadership has made it no secret that one of their biggest pivots with the legendary film studio is to double down on franchises. The studio has quickly made moves to get the Star Trek series back on the big screen, along with finally delivering a sequel to the highest-grossing zombie movie of all-time, World War Z. It doesn’t stop there, though, with new films in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise taking precedence alongside Sonic the Hedgehog, and the continued resurgence of the Scream series. Plans for Top Gun 3 are also in motion by the studio.

One of the biggest franchises that the new Paramount team is inheriting, though, is one that has printed money for decades: the Transformers franchise. Almost exactly three years ago today, though, the last movie in the series arrived with 2023’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, a film that ended on a cliffhanger for what would come next. Now, the series is finally moving forward, with news coming today that IT: Welcome to Derry scribe Jason Fuchs has been tapped to write the next Transformers movie, according to TheWrap.

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As Transformers fans may recall, 2023’s Rise of the Beasts finally delivered some major pieces of the franchise to the big screen, including not only the Beast Wars characters, but the villain Unicron and a connection to the GI Joe franchise. According to today’s report, though, the new Transformers movie that Jason Fuchs is writing is one of many in the franchise that are in the works, which also includes the Transformers & GI Joe crossover. That in mind, the crossover film (being written by Jurassic World‘s Derek Connolly) will seemingly be the piece of the story that picks up from that cliffhanger tease, meaning Fuchs’ Transformers may go its own way.

Today’s report is quick to note that plot details for Fuchs’ Transformers movie are under wraps, but given the trajectory of the series, it’s easy to see how the next film could become another soft reboot of the entire franchise. 2018’s Bumblebee was quick to move the timeline to the ’80s and fill in some story gaps (while creating all-new plot holes) in the aftermath of the poorly received Transformers: The Last Knight. Furthermore, Rise of the Beasts leaped ahead to the ’90s and told its own story.

All that is to say that a new Transformers movie will seemingly find a path that does its best to not remove the context of anything else that has happened in the franchise, but also deliver a fresh entry point for audiences and a way to kickstart the series again. This is exactly what the series has been doing for some time. The trouble, though, is that the Transformers movie franchise continuity has become a tangled, complicated web.

With a franchise that’s seven movies deep and a collective $5.4 billion at the global box office, that’s a series that a studio won’t throw away for the sake of just starting over. The problem, of course, is that the timeline of the Transformers movies is already quite complicated and bizarre. Say the new film jumped to the 2000s after the last movie was in the ’90s; how will it react against the original film from Michael Bay…which was released in 2007?

All that in mind, one of the advantages of the fact that Transformers continuity is convoluted and breaks itself is that it doesn’t actually matter. Fans of the series largely won’t mind if a new movie contradicts the others, as long as it delivers cars transforming into robots that fight each other and includes robots that they recognize. To that end, it’s also worth noting that screenwriters have been hired to write Transformers movies that have gone nowhere for years now, so only time will tell if Fuchs’ has the touch to get it off the ground.