New Video from Paramount Gives insight on ROTB Chronology, and Characters Noah, Elena, and Mirage

william-james88 wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:"In chronological order, this is the second of the Transformers movies. It takes place in the '90s, shortly after Bumblebee."

Well, yeah. We knew that.

Some people need clarification, plus it further highlights how Paramount sees all these live action films as one set of Transformers movies. They are staying far away from the R word here.

First-Aid wrote:Another possibility is that Scourge and the Terrorcons were called to Earth as Unicron is ALREADY the planet and the view we saw of Unicron from space and eating a planet was a flashback during an explanation of what he is.

Sabrblade wrote:

Stormshot_Prime wrote:I have a tingling feeling that perhaps Earth is indeed still Unicron? And the flashbacks we see are prior to his time as our homeworld? And perhaps Optimus must travel within the Earth to confront him (Hence why we see him literally eye-to-eye with the Cron man himself)?

Optimus in this movie mustn't find out about Unicron being Earth since that revelation comes as a shock to him later in TLK.

Unless he gets some kind of amnesia between movies, which would be bleh.

First-Aid wrote:Remember the post credit scene where there is a holographic human who is asking if we wanted to know how to beat Unicron?

Yeah, that was Quintessa.

Sabrblade wrote:

Stormshot_Prime wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

Stormshot_Prime wrote:I have a tingling feeling that perhaps Earth is indeed still Unicron? And the flashbacks we see are prior to his time as our homeworld? And perhaps Optimus must travel within the Earth to confront him (Hence why we see him literally eye-to-eye with the Cron man himself)?

Optimus in this movie mustn't find out about Unicron being Earth since that revelation comes as a shock to him later in TLK.

Unless he gets some kind of amnesia between movies, which would be bleh.

First-Aid wrote:Remember the post credit scene where there is a holographic human who is asking if we wanted to know how to beat Unicron?

Yeah, that was Quintessa.

This is a good point, that revelation seems to be news to all the Bots. That, and we see ancient texts depicting Earth's true nature as Unicron that were written waaay before the modern day.

Quintessa herself as a character brings up another good point; Are we going with the Quintesson "builder" creation story, or rolling it back to the Allspark? A mix? Unicron's presence also typically brings with it Primus and/or the Matrix (which Optimus shouldn't technically have...)

I think from a purely practical, non-fan perspective, that the studios simply don't care about the continuity of Unicron being whatever. Whatever happens in ROTB will probably be forgotten by the next one anyways; Maximals who?

There's only so much in-universe time between the current setting of "the 90's" and 2007 for the OG film.

You bring up a good point regarding the Matrix. If Optimus is ever revealed to already have it in this movie, then these movies will have officially proven to have a worse grasp on continuity than Power Rangers Super Megaforce, and that's BAD.

TOO MUCH ENERGON! wrote:There is no series in the history of cinema with a worse sense of continuity than the Highlander franchise.

Spider5800 wrote:The way they've marketed these, I think they're only setting these up as prequels to the first three films and ignoring AoE and TLK entirely. Kind of like how the Halloween movies basically ignored the films everyone hated and made sequels that were essentially reboots of the continuity.

And honestly? I can't blame them. I doubt the greater movie going public liked or even remembered those last two Bay films.

So with that in mind, I wouldn't count on anything we learned about Unicron in TLK to matter. Could still be Earth, could be a whole other thing, but I doubt anything we learned in later movies will be referenced here.

william-james88 wrote:We have our most comprehensive interview yet with Transformers Rise of the Beasts' director Steven Caple Jr. While it reinforces many elements which fans have expressed disliking, like the push for diversity, rap culture, Michael Bay helping with the film and ensuring the preservation of the Bayverse, it does give us something very refreshing compared to all other Transformers films: a focus on the robots as characters the audience can truly care about. While we did have that with Bumblebee, that film was centered around the nostalgic concept of a human befriending an alien creature (who could not talk), learning about our world. This film instead is about teams of robots, each made up of distinct characters, with their own personalities and reasons for acting as they do.

Here is the blurb concerning what the director hopes to accomplish with this film and you can read the entire interview from the Hollywood Reporter here.

I hope it’s not a cheesy answer, but I want people to be able to connect with the new Transformers that we’re creating. Yes, I definitely want people to connect with the humans, too, because they now look like us more than ever in this film. But, if anything, I just really want people to be able to emotionally connect with the Transformers that you know and the new [Transformers] that we’re bringing to the table. I’m not here to just create robots for you to say, “Yeah, that was cool. That was fun.” I want you to be like, “I really truly care about [Optimus] Primal. I really truly care about Airazor and these other characters,” because this is the foundation for what I would love the franchise to be going forward. And a lot of the stuff in this film is a huge setup for where the franchise can go, so I’m excited for people to check that out.

william-james88 wrote:By the way, while I really want this film to succeed, and I think it's doing everything right with the marketing, I truly think the Flash will wipe the floor with TF ROTB.

I think the Flash will be a juggernaut, an event type movie, and suck up all the hype or good word of mouth ROTB may have.

We'll see what happens but this is my prediction. ROTB will have a strong opening week and then a massive drop (like over 60%) for the following week and then just keep dropping and having little stay factor in cinemas, being pushed to digital quickly to recoup costs there.