Paramount Pictures has assembled its “writer’s room” for the future of the Transformers franchise, and now the first idea has slipped out. In the wake of Age of Extinction’s $1.1 billion gross, Paramount set Akiva Goldsman to put together a group of writers to hash out ideas for future sequels and spinoffs, then set the individual writers to pen the separate scripts. Today Deadline reports that Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari have joined the group, and one of the ideas they might be working on is a prequel called Transformers One, which is “more or less an origin story that takes place on Cybertron”.

Barrer and Ferrari were set by Marvel Studios to do a final pass on the Ant-Man script, after Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish’s screenplay was rewritten by Adam McKay and Paul Rudd. They don’t have a final credit on the finished movie, but apparently Paramount was impressed enough with either that work or other writing samples to bring them onboard the Transformers train.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Apparently it’s still early days, and Transformers One could end up being an animated film (though even a live-action Transformers movie is basically an animated film), but Barrer and Ferrari are being hired with the intention of having them also script a live-action Transformers movie.

As revealed last weekTransformers writer’s room also includes The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, Art Marcum & Matt Holloway (Punisher: War Zone), Zak Penn (The Incredible Hulk), and Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2), and they’ll work together to craft a series of sequels and spinoffs.


Per Deadline, the goal is to have Transformers 5 ready to go by the time Michael Bay has finished his Benghazi drama 13 Hours, with other Transformers movies to follow. Does this mean Bay is returning to direct a fifth movie in this franchise? I really, really hope not. I’m not the biggest fan of Bay as a director, but I’d at least like to see some diversity in his filmography. Then again, when the guy is responsible for making your studio billions of dollars, you do everything you can to get him back in the director’s chair.

We’ll see how this progresses going forward, but as I’ve said before, this notion of approaching film franchises like a TV show is a bad idea. What do you think, folks? Does the idea of a Transformers writer’s room make you more interested in the franchise? Would you see a Cybertron movie? Sound off in the comments below.

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Image via Paramount