The Next ‘Transformers’ Movie Will Be Called ‘Rise of the Beasts’
Congratulations, Beast Wars fans. It looks like your time has finally come again.
The team behind the Transformers film franchise formally announced the plan for the next movie in the franchise today. It will be titled Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, adapting the Transformers: Beast Wars cartoons of the 1990s. The human stars will be In the Heights’ Anthony Ramos and Judas and the Black Messiah’s Dominique Fishback. The director will be Steven Caple Jr., who previously directed Creed II.
At a press event, producers revealed the film will be set between the first batch of Transformers movies directed by Michael Bay and 2018’s Bumblebee, which served as prequel to the other films and took place in the 1980s. Just like in the Beast Wars series, there will be Maximals and Predacons. Peter Cullen will also return to voice stalwart Transformer hero Optimus Prime. Instead of Megatron, the main villain of the film will be Scourge, a character from the Beast Wars line.
For those who never saw Beast Wars, it was essentially a sequel to the original Transformers cartoons of the 1990s. Set in the future, it featured new groups of good and evil robots that inherited the roles of the old Autobots (who became the Maximals) and the Decepticons (now the Predacons). Instead of the cel animation of the original series, it was made with early computer animation that ... uh ... well, it doesn’t exactly hold up against the standards of the 2020s. Take a look for yourself:
I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ transforming animals look a bit more realistic than the ones on the Beast Wars show. Just a hunch.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is scheduled to open in theaters on June 24, 2022. Just one year away, Beast Wars fans.