The legacy started by Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie is a longstanding and familiar one to general audiences, despite the inconsistent quality. While its days of being a guaranteed box office titan have come and gone, it’s undeniable that they were wildly influential in terms of both inflating studio revenue expectations, but also the cultivation of the massive-scale event movies that have come to dominate theaters every summer. Because of their ubiquity (we’ve had a Transformers movie in theaters consistently every few years for almost two decades now) and the general aimlessness of the franchise since Bay’s departure, the last few years have given us some wildly varied projects.
At first glance, the universe created by that first Transformers film back in 2007 seems disparate and cobbled together, and to some degree they are. But that level of narrative relaxation has given them the opportunity to go to some wild and audacious places. From Michael Bay giving us an Autobot adventure that connects back to King Arthur’s Roundtable, all the way to us getting a fully-animated feature taking place entirely on Cybertron, the series has reinvented itself several times with a very loose grasp on canon and continuity. The new films take place in a strange No Man’s Land, where they could be prequels to the original five live-action films, while also existing as their own offshoot.
