Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Audience Score Sets Franchise High

The audience scores are in for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts — and it seems the latest Transformers movie is more than meets the eye. Professional critics gave Beasts a 55% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, but the verified audience score is currently sitting at 88%: the best moviegoer score in the live-action franchise's 16-year history. Fans seemed to enjoy Rise of the Beasts more than 2018's Bumblebee (74% audience score) — still the best-reviewed movie with critics at 91% — and the original movie that spawned the blockbuster franchise, 2007's Transformers (85%).

Rise of the Beasts also fared far better with audiences than 2009's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (57%), 2011's Transformers: Dark of the Moon (55%), 2014's Transformers: Age of Extinction (50%), and 2017's Transformers: The Last Knight (43%). (See all the Transformers movies ranked from best to worst, and find out where to stream the Transformers movies online.)

Bumblebee may be the most acclaimed Transformers movie, but when bringing Beast Wars to the big screen, producers wished to balance the action and spectacle the franchise is known for with genuine human emotion. 

"People really loved the heartfelt story of Bumblebee, but some of the core fan base wanted a more intense experience, so when we set out to make this movie, our goal was to combine heart and spectacle, and to make sure those two sides served each other well,"
producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura said in production materials. "This film has the enormous scale that the Transformers films are known for and the intimacy of Bumblebee in terms of the relationships. It's just a really big experience in every way possible."

Taking inspiration from the Beast Wars: Transformers animated series, the new movie introduces "a lot of new heroes and villains that are going to blow the minds of diehard fans," di Bonaventuraadded. "It's chock full of robots we haven't seen in a movie before. That's one of the great things about Transformers: The lore is based on what happened back on Cybertron, which gives us a lot of leeway to explore the universe at large. So in this movie, we're bringing in the Maximals for the very first time."

There are the Autobots, the robots in disguise who transform into vehicles: Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), Bumblebee, Arcee (Liza Koshy), Wheeljack (Cristo Fernánde), and Mirage (Pete Davidson). And there are the Maximals, the living metallic organic robo-beasts: the mighty simian Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), the soaring Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), the majestic Cheetor (Tongayi
Chirisa), and the armor-plated Rhinox (David Sobolov). Together, the two factions must unite against Scourge (Peter Dinklage) and work together to prevent the evil Unicron (Colman Domingo) from annihilating Earth.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is now playing only in theaters.