Reboot that robot! Another franchise swerves round the 'continuity' problem...

After rumours that he would abandon the Transformers franchise after the (highly successful) Dark Side Of The Moon, it has been confirmed that Michael Bay has in fact been signed as director on two further Transformers movies. And that the franchise will be rebooted, Spider-Man style. Sort of...

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura hedges round the issue nicely in a chat with Josh Horowitz at MTV:

Well I mean again it’s hybrid. It’s not the way—I’m not involved with Spider-Man but what I perceive Spider-Man to be is a redoing of the whole thing, [Transformers 4] is not. It’s an evolution. There’s still continuity that’s going on, and yet there’ll be a lot of new cast. Whether there’s anybody from the [original] cast, we don’t even know yet. But the truth is, it’s gonna be a whole new story. The characters that would certainly come along would be Optimus and Bumblebee I’m sure.

So, we're told that in the spirit of G.I. Joe: Retaliation, a few characters may 'carry over'. What I'd like to know is whether those characters will get their minds wiped liked Threepio at the end of Revenge Of The Sith - because if they return played 'as before', with knowledge of previous events in instalments 1-3, this may be the most half-hearted of Hollywood reboots, the use of the 'R' word only being bandied about in a vain attempt to avoid conspicuously absent faces such as Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox.

I wonder if something very special indeed is going on over at the preview rooms for Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man; I suspect, as that project coheres in a (presumably) very agreeable fashion for Hollywood execs, that the urge to 'start over' with franchises may become even more epidemic.

Of course, no producer wants to go through the tension of the 'Ringo factor', and the risk of trying to persuade an existing loyal fan-base to accept new (younger...?) faces over old in the same continuity-line. Easier to zero the franchise totally, lower the potential contractual renegotiation costs of franchise actors whose 3-film contracts have expired (and whose fees have now become negotiable), and get a chance to substitute the post-modern irony to which all sequels seem to succumb for the zest of a brand-new origin story.

It could even be that the spectre of a reboot has become the new Hollywood Heavy at negotiating tables across the board. But whether or not that is a factor, the lack of commitment demonstrated in the current round of Transformers 4-5 statements is puzzling.

Transformers 4 has been given a release date of June 29, 2014.

Collider

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