Do you remember “Transformers”? Do you remember Optimus Prime, Megatron and Bumblebee?
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, this franchise was everywhere. Wherever you’d look, you’d see toys, fast food promotions and the trailers the whole nine yards. The Autobots and Decepticons were inescapable, but everything changed in the mid-2010s.
After “Transformers: Age of Extinction” made over one billion in the box office while being, what I consider to be, one of the worst movies ever made, Paramount tried to ride that high with “Transformers: Age of Extinction”. It lost over $100 million and Paramount decided to deal with this situation in a different way. They let Travis Knight, a man who liked Transformers, come in and direct Bumblebee, and he did an excellent job. The film had competitors such as “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and “Aquaman”.
Paramount didn’t capitalize on the success though, waiting over 5 years to release “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts”, a movie that barely acknowledges Bumblebee and I feel is an overstuffed mess. Is “Rise of the Beasts” bad? No, but it isn’t great either, leading to it having remarkably less success in the box office.
Around the same time as “Rise of the Beasts”, Paramount announced an animated original movie called “Transformers One”, which chronicled how Optimus Prime and Megatron went from brothers to enemies. As any reboot is, it was met with internet vitriol due to the voice cast. Chris Hemmsworth was voicing Optimus Prime and Brian Tyree Henry was voicing Megatron. Keegan-Michael Key, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi and Jon Hamm were announced as Bumblebee, Elita-1, Starscream, and Sentinel Prime respectively, with a release date of Sept. 20, 2024.
The first trailer dropped and it looked really bad. It was a 2-minute compilation of Key as Bumblebee, saying unfunny jokes that would most likely be appealing to only younger audience members. All of the trailers looked bad and there was no marketing for the movie leading up to the Sept. 20, 2024 release date.
While it didn’t do well on opening weekend, only making $25 million, but the people who saw it loved it. Later on, it spread with word of mouth and people realized it was a good and mature story for an animated movie.
The story follows Orion Pax and D-16, two cogless miners for their planet Cybertron, as they mine for Energon for their leader Sentinel Prime. Prime tells the citizens to mine for Energon to power up the planet while he searches for the Matrix of Leadership and fights the Quintessons. When a job goes awry, they and their boss Elita-1 get fired. This is the part where it gets good and I want you to watch it for yourself, but I hope this gets you hooked.