Good news for those of you - and you are many - still enjoying a semi-regular blast of Autobot V Decepticon mayhem. The billion-dollar box office performance of last year's Transformers: Age Of Extinction has seen studio Paramount map out the journey of the robots in disguise for the next decade. Transformers 5 was already in the works, but Transformers 6, 7 and 8 are also now plotted. And there will be spin-offs too.
“We just finished an incredible experience,” says Steven J. Davis, the head of Transformers toy manufacturers Hasbro. “We decided that we wanted to plot out the next ten years of the Transformers franchise."
A tribe of writers have spent three months thrashing out the on-screen future of the brand, shepherded by Akiva Goldsman, "who many of you may know won an Academy Award for A Beautiful Mind and written a bunch of great movies,” continues Davis, tactfully not mentioning Batman And Robin. “And they plotted out the next ten years of Transformers. Similarly, we are doing the same in television and in digital. So stay tuned, Transformers 5 is on its way, and 6 and 7 and 8.”
Who are the members of this Transformers brain trust? Let us count them. Along with the aforementioned Goldsman, those present for the three-month lock-in included Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down); Christina Hodson (Shut In); Lindsay Beer (the developing Short Circuit remake); Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (Haunt); Robert Kirkman (Walking Dead); Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (Iron Man); Zak Penn (The Incredible Hulk); Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2); Steven DeKnight (Daredevil); and Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Justin Lin's developing Hibernation).
Director Michael Bay has yet to commit himself to Transformers 5, but with or without him, it's currently pencilled in for a release sometime in 2017.