Paramount’s live-action Transformers franchise immediately became interesting again with the announcement of the upcoming seventh film, Rise of the Beasts, and the title’s promise of Beast Wars being brought to the big screen. In the same way that there is no Transformers without Optimus Prime, there is no real Beast Wars (or loose adaptation of its plot) without Optimus Primal, one of his distant descendants.
Though it’s unclear exactly how Rise of the Beasts’ timeline is going to work out, Paramount’s just confirmed—via reporting from Collider—that Primal’s going to be played by one Ron Perlman, who first voiced the character in Machinima’s Transformers: Power of the Primes series.
Ron Perlman joins the cast of #Transformers: Rise of the Beasts as the voice of Optimus Primal. Experience it in theatres June 24, 2022. https://t.co/RATSBAtPGe
— Transformers (@transformers) June 28, 2021
Though the original Beast Wars cartoons had a somewhat prehistoric (though scientifically inaccurate, for the pedants out there) aesthetics, the series was actually set in the distant future of the prime Transformers continuity. Rise of the Beasts is reportedly set in 1994, within the continuities of the previous live-action Transformers movies—meaning that its take on the Maximals could either be time travelers arriving from the future, or perhaps reimagined as ancient Transformers who’ve been hanging around for multiple millennia, ignoring everything else that’s gone down. However the film works the characters into its plot, though, what’s really going to end up determining how audiences respond to them is how well the transformations between humanoid robot to… animal work, in Rise of the Beasts.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is set to hit theaters on June 24, 2022.
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