‘Bumblebee’ Producer Teases Future Plan for ‘Transformers’ Franchise

After a film series filled with explosions, colorful metal, and the antics of Michael Bay, the Transformers franchise is getting a breath of fresh air with this month’s critically-acclaimed spinoff, Bumblee. Naturally, with the change in style and scenery, many are looking at this installment as the one that will reboot the entire franchise, making Transformers movies something that audiences actually want to see in the future.

While Bumblebee does seem to do the latter, don’t start referring to it as a reboot just yet. While speaking with /Film, producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura said that he doesn’t see Bumblebee as a way of starting Transformers over again, but rather a new direction for the series.

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

Rather than a reboot, Bumblebee does represent a sort of course correction for Transformers. Things aren’t starting over, but they are moving toward something different than they were 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.”

Due to the positive reactions to Bumblebee, the producers will use it’s emotional, grounded tone as the blueprint for whichever Transformers movie comes next.

“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 said. “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.”

Bumblebee is set to hit theaters on December 21st.