First Bumblebee Trailer Reveals the 80s-Set Transformers Spinoff

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First 'Bumblebee' Trailer Reveals the 80s-Set 'Transformers' Spinoff

By Dave Trumbore

Published Jun 5, 2018

Hailee Steinfeld leads the coming-of-age story, which marks the live-action directorial debut of LAIKA's Travis Knight.

Paramount Pictures has released the first trailer for Bumblebee, the very first spinoff from the studio's wildly lucrative Transformers film franchise. The studio tapped LAIKA CEO and Kubo and the Two Strings director Travis Knight to make his live-action directing debut on the pic, which finds Hailee Steinfeld taking on the lead human role in a story that takes place in the 1980s.

Indeed, Bumblebee will set itself apart from Michael Bay's five (!) Transformers films in that it is set in the 1980s and tells a smaller scale story, with the titular Transformer befriending a young girl. The tone is said to be more in line with a coming-of-age/teen movie, with Bumblebee featuring as one of the only major Transformers in the film. That's a stark contrast to Bay's movies, in which the fate of the entire planet is on the line. That’s a change of pace from the nonsensical action of Michael Bay’s five (!) Transformers films, and it’ll be interesting to see how audiences respond.

As you can tell from this first trailer, which feels more like "A Girl and Her Robot" story than any of Bay's high-octane, often incomprehensible action-packed smash-em-ups, and I'm here for it. It's interesting that the title character has already become a legacy character within the Transformers movie franchise--the marketing team understands this full well and that tie-in is on display in this trailer--but Knight and Steinfeld look to make their own unique mark on the ongoing saga.

Watch the first Bumblebee trailer below. Written by Christina Hodson, the film also stars John Cena, Pamela Adlon, Kenneth Choi, Megan Pryce, and Martin Short. Bumblebee opens in theaters on December 21st.

Here's the official synopsis for Bumblebee:

On the run in the year 1987, Bumblebee finds refuge in a junkyard in a small Californian beach town. Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), on the cusp of turning 18 and trying to find her place in the world, discovers Bumblebee, battle-scarred and broken. When Charlie revives him, she quickly learns this is no ordinary, yellow VW bug.