Did you love Bumblebee for its refreshing take on the Transformers movie universe—and by “refreshing take,” I mean “the fact that it was good”? Well, bad news.
Franchise producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura spoke to Collider recently about the future of the Transformers movies in a post-Bumblebee world—which apparently includes not just a Bumblebee 2, but also a sequel to Transformers: The Last Knight, making the idea of rebooting the Transformers movie franchise suddenly about as incomprehensible as watching the vast majority of Transformers movies. But that revelation wasn’t actually the most disconcerting reveal in the interview. Instead, it was di Bonaventura hinting that the Bumblebee sequel could lean a little more into the style of the Michael Bay movies:
I know the next Transformer, our attempt anyway, is to sort of do a fusion of Bumblebee and the Bay movies. A little more Bayhem. And a little bit more of the character falling in love within the emotional dynamic of the movie. One of the things I want to do—and I hope we pull it off—is, we did it with Bumblebee because he’s so cute and he’s so accessible, but he can’t talk. I think the more human we can make these characters, the more people are going to like them.
Maybe what di Bonaventura is trying to say is just that there’ll be more action in general for Bumblebee 2, rather than necessarily emulating the style of action in the Bay Transformers films or adding anything else from them tonally. After all, the setup for the sequel is all about the fleeing Autobots creating a new base of operations on Earth to fight back against the Decepticons. That predicates a jump in scale and tension well beyond a lot of what we saw in Bumblebee.
But even then, part of what made Bumblee so charmingly surprising last December was its earnest, thorough rejection of what defined Bay’s take on Transformers in the first place. Responding to the reception of that more intimate take on the characters with the idea that what people actually want from a sequel is a jagged, Cybertronian bucketload of incoherent action-porn seems, well, like asking for disappointment.
We’ll have to wait and see. Not all is to despair just yet—after all, Christina Hodson, who penned the first Bumblebee script, has previously said that she has ideas she’d love to expound on in a sequel—so if she’s back for round two, that’ll be a promising continuation. Hopefully whatever comes from attempting to inject some Bayhem into a Bumblebee 2 keeps the balance in the first film’s favor.
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