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[Tyrannacon]

I know both Cullen and Welker are getting older and closer to retirement, so I understand the logistical reasons why they won't or don't want to voice younger versions of their characters. I think both Hemsworth and Henry should have made a more distinct effort to give a performance where you recognize who these characters were or are going to become.

To be a little fair to Henry, it's not as if Megatron has really had that much vocal consistency in the past 40 years.

• G1 cartoon: Frank Welker made him sound like a scratchy-throated geezer.
• TFTM (Galvatron): Leonard Nimoy made him sound like, well, an evil Leonard Nimoy.
• G1 cartoon (Galvatron): Frank Welker changed his voice to make him sound like a high-pitched raving madman.
• RID 2001: Daniel Riordan made him sound like a different high-pitched raving madman with a hint of Robert Axelrod's Lord Zedd in his voice.
• Unicron Trilogy: David Kaye made him sound like a grumpier, less charismatic version of Beast Wars Megatron.
• Movies 1-3: Hugo Weaving made him sound like a generic, deep-voiced angry man.
• Animated: Corey Burton made him sound like a grumpy impression of Sir John Hurt.
• Cyber Missions: Tony Gialluca II made him sound like an impression of Hugo Weaving's Megatron.
• WFC/FOC/ROTDS: Fred Tatasciore also made him sound like an impression of Hugo Weaving's Megatron, but a little higher-pitched.
• Prime: No longer able to do the scratchy-throated geezer voice, Welker made him instead sound more like a deeper-voiced Bond villain but with his own occasional bouts of raving madness.
• AOE/TLK: Welker again altered his voice to make him sound deeper but also more robotic and inhuman, more alien, and still very angry.
• Prime Wars Trilogy: Jason Marnocha made him sound like a wonderful impression of the snarky Universal Studios walkaround Megatron character, and even a bit like Bernard Erhard's snarky Cy-Kill from Challenge of the Go-Bots (though, I sure these were both unintentional).
• Cyberverse: Marc Thompson made him sound like a halfway medium between Hugo Weaving's Megatron and Welker's Prime Megatron.
• Netflix WFCT: Jason Marnocha changed his Megatron voice to sound deeper, grumpier, and nowhere near as snarky as before.
• EarthSpark: Rory McCann made him sound a LOT less angry and, well, Scottish.

Conversely, a majority of Optimus Prime's voice actors have been either Peter Cullen, Garry Chalk, or Peter Cullen impressionists (Neil Kaplan, Eric Edwards, Jon Bailey, Jake Foushee, and Hiro Diaz). The only real vocal deviation in Optimus Prime voice actors has come from David Kaye's younger Optimus in Animated and Alan Tudyk's unique Optimus in EarthSpark.

My brain groups all the Megatron/Galvatron voices with the whole idea they sound villainous or atypical villains. Brian Tyree Henry's voice doesn't sound enough in line with the previous incarnations or villain-y enough is my complaint. I'll concede though that we only hear him speak for a couple of seconds and a small fraction of the trailer altogether so I am probably not giving it much of a chance. The same with Chris Hemsworth not sounding right either. I will give this movie a chance, and I happily concede the point that I am being too harsh about it. Thanks for laying that out for me. I do appreciate that.

[Sabrblade]

The central theme to Megatron's voice is that they all sound like bad guys or atypical villains is where I was going with this. It doesn't sound enough in line with the previous incarnations or villain-y enough.

That might be the intention, though, since this is a point in Megatron's life when he isn't supposed to be villainous. He's not a bad guy yet, so he oughtn't sound like one yet.

[Sabrblade]

The more I think about the whole "reboot or not" debate surrounding Bumblebee, Rise of the Beasts, and this movie, the more I begin to realize that all these post-TLK movies seem willing to mainly/only keep continuity with the 2007 movie, but none of the sequels.

Bumblebee threw out TLK's claim of Bee having been on Earth since World War II and many other Transformers having come during various points in history, but still uses Sector Seven, a younger Agent Simmons, purposely omits Megatron from the opening sequence on Cybertron (since he'd be frozen inside Hoover Dam on Earth during that time), and ends with Bumblebee scanning a pristine version of the old Camaro he'd have at the beginning of the 2007 film.

Rise of the Beasts ignored TLK's depiction of Unicron as being within the Earth by instead opting for the more traditional appearance of him as a massive monster planet separate from Earth (though, the movie also subtly hinted that the Maximals and Terrorcons came from the future, meaning ROTB Unicron did as well, but I digress), but also took steps to ensure that the greater world at large remained oblivious to the existence of the Transformers per the initial status quo of the 2007 movie. Creator comments also described Optimus's character arc in this movie as being meant to show how he becomes the person that he is in the 2007 movie.

Now, while those two movies seemed to have only disregarded the messy movie that was TLK (and Steven Caple Jr. even admitted that he didn't care for either it or AOE), going by what we can see in the trailer for TF One, it seems very possible that it may end up ignoring the events of both ROTF and DOTM as well. TF One seems to be drawing heavily from the backstory created for the Aligned continuity, which took some aspects from the 2007 movie's backstory, but greatly contradicted what both ROTF and DOTM added to said first movie's backstory.

• Namely, the TF One trailer shows what look to be the corpses of the Thirteen, with D-16 giving particular attention to what looks to be the dead body of Megatronus, The Fallen. Whereas ROTF was all about The Fallen's survival into the present day and being the living mentor of Megatron. The Thirteen themselves are also an issue since there were only Seven Primes in ROTF.
• The Aligned backstory also had Optimus acquiring the Matrix of Leadership in the distant past on Cybertron long before he ever first came to Earth, whereas ROTF had him first acquire the Matrix on Earth in the 21st century, after it had been hidden away on the planet within the Tomb of the Primes since ancient times. And sure enough, we see a glimpse of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, Matrix and all, in this trailer.
• And then there's Sentinel Prime, who appears to the be blue guy being tortured by a Quintesson in the trailer. In the Aligned backstory, he died on Cybertron during this past era. If he dies in this movie, too, then that goes against DOTM saying he departed Cybertron aboard a spacecraft named the Ark, crash-landed on Earth's moon in 1961, and was reawakened on Earth by Optimus Prime in the 21st century (and had also made a deal with Megatron regarding the conquest of Earth).

Granted, it still remains to be seen just how much of this movie's plot will be faithful to the Aligned backstory, but a pretty fair amount of what's seen in this trailer seems to line up with it. And, the trailer still made a point to mention Bee's original name of B-127, as first given in the Bumblebee movie, in order to at least align with that.

So it seems that what we have here is less of a hard reboot like so many have been insisting, and more of a case of the 2007 movie occupying multiple expanded universes consisting of different movies. A "sequel continuity" (2007 plus ROTF, DOTM, AOE, and TLK) and a "prequel continuity" (2007 plus BB, ROTB, and One), if you will. This is basically like how the Beast Wars cartoon occupies multiple expanded universes of its own (the BotCon one, the Dreamwave one, the 2006 IDW one, the Japanese G1 one, and the Wings Universe), or like how the Marvel G1 comics are followed by the Marvel G2 comics in one universe, followed by the Fun Pub Classics fiction in another universe, and followed by Regeneration One (and preceded by both Transformers '84 and Secrets & Lies) in yet another universe.

Is all of this complicated, confusing, and convoluted? Yeah. But that's what happens when different creators all want to play in the same sandbox, but not with each other. It happens. A lot.

[Glyph]

I think this seems likely, noting that Cooley specifically mentioned being shown the Binder by Hasbro and seeing "all this story" outside the Bayverse movies that he wanted to use. TBH the inconsistent way movies 1-5 handled their own internal continuity makes all questions of 'reboots' or otherwise largely moot for me - the live-action films have already become more or less a 'broad strokes' setting, not a continuous story.

It could be a bit of a Highlander situation, as you say, where the sequels are largely ignored and new stories are built off the first film's foundation, but my read of the interview and what we saw in the trailer is that the approach here is just to hit 'key points' of the story, based mostly on what either made it into the Binder or are particularly remembered from the initial film: the Thirteen, the broad strokes of the Aligned pre-war period, the basic outlines of the main characters, the Transformers come to Earth in the recent past, Sector 7 is the human government agency, and so on. As said before, I get a very 'Guardians' feel from the trailer, and that film was certainly happy to pick and mix from all over Marvel comics and film history in setting up a new front for the MCU.

In short, I expect them to keep the bits they like or that work for their story and ignore the rest. I don't expect anyone working on the film to really be thinking in terms of deep lore and canonicity; that's a fan thing (and to a certain extent, a TV show thing). IMO, this won't be a prequel (which presumes that it's in continuity with the existing story) or a reboot (which implies a conscious effort to replace the existing story with a new continuity for future films); it'll just be another story in the TF tapestry, one which rhymes with a lot of the 2007 and Aligned stuff but isn't necessarily bound by any of it.

--EDIT
Uh, did I just restate Sabrblade's whole post? Possibly. Sorry if that got a bit "Explain my own post to me!", I got a bit sidetracked in rambling.

[First-Aid]

Rise of the Beasts ignored TLK's depiction of Unicron as being within the Earth by instead opting for the more traditional appearance of him as a massive monster planet separate from Earth (though, the movie also subtly hinted that the Maximals and Terrorcons came from the future, meaning ROTB Unicron did as well, but I digress), but also took steps to ensure that the greater world at large remained oblivious to the existence of the Transformers per the initial status quo of the 2007 movie.

I see this as something they could fool around with as a plot in the future. They revealed that, yes, Unicron is a powerful planet-sized entity, and Quintessa's goal was his reactivation. Could there have been at one point an incidence where, in order to save either Cybertron or Earth, the Autobots were forced to trap Unicron's essence in a device/container/artifact in the Earth that, by the time TLK occurs, he has started to escape from? Quintessa could have been a Terrorcon or even a Cybertronian originally and lied about being the Creator to Optimus, maybe taking Scourge's place after he was destroyed. Scourge had the ability to infect others with his essence...that could explain Quintessa's ability as well- a gift from Unicron.

Just throwing that out there...there are a few elements from both movies that could crossover and potentially cement more continuity. Note the word "potentially". Just a hypothesis on my part how it could be explained.

[Sabrblade]

Rise of the Beasts ignored TLK's depiction of Unicron as being within the Earth by instead opting for the more traditional appearance of him as a massive monster planet separate from Earth (though, the movie also subtly hinted that the Maximals and Terrorcons came from the future, meaning ROTB Unicron did as well, but I digress), but also took steps to ensure that the greater world at large remained oblivious to the existence of the Transformers per the initial status quo of the 2007 movie.

I see this as something they could fool around with as a plot in the future. They revealed that, yes, Unicron is a powerful planet-sized entity, and Quintessa's goal was his reactivation. Could there have been at one point an incidence where, in order to save either Cybertron or Earth, the Autobots were forced to trap Unicron's essence in a device/container/artifact in the Earth that, by the time TLK occurs, he has started to escape from? Quintessa could have been a Terrorcon or even a Cybertronian originally and lied about being the Creator to Optimus, maybe taking Scourge's place after he was destroyed. Scourge had the ability to infect others with his essence...that could explain Quintessa's ability as well- a gift from Unicron.

Just throwing that out there...there are a few elements from both movies that could crossover and potentially cement more continuity. Note the word "potentially". Just a hypothesis on my part how it could be explained.

But remember, I said the movie hinted that the Maximals, Terrorcons, and planet Unicron were all from the future, so Earth Unicron would be his past self, so planet Unicron would have been trying to consume his past self (maybe to simply empower himself through an unholy fusion of the two).

And TLK said that Unicron is "Cybertron's ancient enemy", meaning the Unicron from that movie was a being from eons ago, with the Earth likely having formed around him like it did in TF: Prime.

And Quintessa's goal was not Unicron's reactivation, she was trying to kill him.