‘Transformers One’ premiered this week in Australia, presenting an origin story for Orion Pax/Optimus Prime and D-16/Megatron. Director Josh Cooley recently described the film to ComicBook as both a prequel to previous ‘Transformers’ movies and a reboot of the series.
“Starting this as an origin story, it was great to go, ‘Nothing’s been done.’ We’ve never seen this before,” the director said. “We’ve never started like this before. There’s obviously a story of what we know will happen: a war will happen, and [the Autobots and Deceptions] will go to Earth. That’s just part of ‘Transformers.’ That’s part of every version of ‘Transformers’ that happens.”
This version also reimagined the events that fans have seen in various forms over the years, including television, other films, and comics.
“The thing I’m excited about moving forward is we can tell the same story and do things slightly differently, the way we started slightly differently,” the director added. “There’s so many different continuities, it’s just a huge sandbox. And so, I think it’s a prequel to the same type of events, but maybe in the future they’re different.”
‘Transformers One’ delved into the period before the Great War between the Autobots and Decepticons that later landed on Earth in 2007’s ‘Transformers’ and 2018’s ‘Bumblebee.’
Cooley directed a screenplay from Eric Pearson, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari for the film, with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Michael Bay, and Mark Vahradian producing.
Di Bonaventura, who also produced previous ‘Transformers’ films, told ComicBook that the upcoming prequel would influence future projects even as a separate entity.
“Josh did such a great job in actualizing the characters in this movie, and it is going to have an impact on the live-action where we can’t not meet that bar,” the producer shared. “It won’t be necessarily literally a character or an event, but it has an effect on what we’re gonna do.”
“You want to do something different [between the animated and live-action films], and you also see where it can be successful. I think that’s where the two universes help each other. You can see what works, and you can do that in either one. The fun of it for me, as a filmmaker, is keeping them separate.”
‘Transformers One’ features Chris Hemsworth as Orion Pax and Brian Tyree Henry as D-16 as well as Scarlett Johansson as Elita-1, Keegan-Michael Key as Bumblebee, Steve Buscemi as Starscream, Jon Hamm as Sentinel Prime, and Laurence Fishburne as Alpha Trion.
