Impossible Autobots

Hey guys, it's Donnie...Progress on the Transformers movie continues slowly but surely. To bring some of you up to date, Dreamworks will be ponying up the dough, with Spielberg producing. Michael Bay is the tentative director, although he's waiting on the script before he signs on the dotted line. Some may shudder and curse at the thought of Bay directing Optimus Prime and Co, but having recently seen The Island, the man has got serious skills with big action set pieces, and much like X3, the mythology and the characters are all pretty well established at this point, so as long as they've got a good script, he can't really screw it up too badly.

So what's going on with the script? Well, it's still in the rather early stages. Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are the guys with the magic pens, but right now they're finishing up their work on Mission Impossible 3 before they really start to tackle the Autobots. We do know that the story is going to focus at least largely on the human element, the phrase being tossed about most often being "a boy and his car" which he discovers to be a robot, etc and so forth. This is fine. The humans were a big part of the original Transformers cartoon, and to be honest, I don't want to see a movie that's just Autobots and Decepticons beating the shit out of each other here on earth. That was never what the Transformers were all about. Maybe the Gobots.

Before heading off to Rome for MI3, Kurtzman and Orci talked about which of those robotic champions and villians we're going to see on the big screen:

"The staple characters: Optimus Prime, Megatron, Soundwave, Shockwave, Starscream, Jazz," Kurtzman replied. "There's going to be a lot of them. You're going to have ten Transformers in that movie, and if that's not enough, you can go see 2, 3, 4 or 5."

As slow as this project seems to be moving, they really do seem pretty intent on turning this thing into a monster franchise, and you'll hear no complaints outta me. I wouldn't mind a nice long kick ass series of Energon disputes. Perhaps the return of Unicron might be in order somewhere down the line???