Lorenzo di Bonaventura talks combining both Hasbro franchises and paying respect to both fans by giving them both equal time.
Transformers One is about to hit screens and it’s already accumulating a bevy of positive responses, which is headlined in the final trailer that quotes our very own Chris Bumbray as saying it will be “The best Transformers movie ever!” It was also implicated that the new movie, while animated, can serve as a prequel to the Michael Bay films. While Bumblebee and Rise of the Beasts were soft-reboots of the franchise with new filmmakers at the helm, the property started to dabble in shared universes with a tease to the G.I. Joes at the end of Rise of the Beasts.
Collider has now revealed that franchise producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura confirms that the next live-action film will crossover both Transformers with the Joes. He states, “Well, we’re going, again, subject to success, we’re going to do a sequel to this, and there will be an animated version, and it will exist completely separately to whatever we do live-action. The next live-action movie will be a crossover. Where it will be particularly affected is the fact that we now know what these robots are capable of emotionally in a way. So we’re going to have to figure out how to create that room, that we can afford that, and create a story that you can take more advantage of that. So one of the things that I’m particularly interested in doing, and we’re still in the development phase, so nothing is by any means written in stone, but I think we need to do more now from the robot point of view in the live-action because that’s the only way you’re really going to get inside them.”
Di Bonaventura also wanted to clarify that the hybrid film will give both character factions equal time to shine, “Instead of them reacting to humans or reacting to the human plot, what is their drive, has to be part of that story now. So it’s going to be complicated because now the hardest thing about a lot of franchise movies is how many characters there are, and the more characters you try to manage, the harder it is to make a bunch of really good ones. You kind of got to keep going, keep it smaller, keep it smaller. So we’ll be in that process for a while where we’ll start with a bunch of Joes and a bunch of Transformers and I’ll say, regular humans, and then you’re going to do this. That’s kind of where we are right now, is trying to put the larger thing in place. The trick in this one, like we were talking about here, in trying to find that tone and balance is like, ‘Well, how much of the Joes do you want? And how much of the Transformers do you want?’”