Transformers: Return of the Gods is allegedly an early working title for Transformers 5 that was in use while Ehren Kruger was still writing for the project. This has never been confirmed, but this title is not the real story here. The more you look into it, the less the film that we got with Transformers: The Last Knight seems to resemble anything that had been promised during the press tour for Transformers: Age of Extinction. At that time those involved with the film told of a sequel set entirely in space that would expand on the mythology introduced in Age of Extinction, with this supposed film not having Michael Bay at the helm as its director. What we got 3 years later was a film entirely set on Earth that introduced a completely new mythology which actively contradicted the previous one, and the film was directed by Michael Bay.
The film itself failed to win over audiences because of its poor quality, but the baffling nature of the incohesion between it and its predecessor is the much more interesting topic to explore. Just what could have unfolded in those 3 years for the plans to change to such a degree? Well, it all has to do with two men: Ehren Kruger and Akiva Goldsman. Both had wildly differing visions for the future of the Transformers franchise, but in the end neither one of their visions was ever brought to fruition. To fully illustrate what exactly occurred behind the scenes with these two men, a lot of ground must be covered, so without further ado, let’s go through it all.
The Reign of Ehren Kruger
Ehren Kruger should be the first one discussed as he joined the Transformers franchise about 7 years before Akiva Goldsman did, with him replacing John Rogers as the third screenwriter for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Even at the beginning Kruger had his own vision for the franchise that was at odds with what others thought was right, in this case it regarded his own personal pitch for Transformers 2 that was shot down with none of the ideas contained within it ever making it into the final product. Kruger remarked on this in an interview with Collider, saying:
“My original pitch for Revenge of the Fallen was a totally different story, 100% different story. That was kind of when I was hired on for the job and then as it came together it became something else.”
Kruger became the sole writer on Transformers 3 after the two other writers – Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman – decided to stop working together in order to pursue separate careers as directors. This time he had more freedom to do whatever he wanted to, with only Michael Bay reining him in on one idea: Unicron. In that same interview, Kruger addressed this, saying:
“Dark of the Moon was pretty much what I set out to pitch, so we had a version of Dark of the Moon at one point that involved Unicron in the pitch phase and that went away, but it was always more or less the plot that the movie turned out to be.”
Kruger expanded upon this in an interview with the Huffington Post, saying:
“The only thing I do keep talking about that seems too big until we find the right stories for it – or the way to make it make sense – is the Unicron character from the mythology, who is a planet-sized Transformer. It's not that it's too big, just that it'll be onscreen whenever we figure out how to make it visually interesting and amazing.”
This isn’t the only thing in Dark of the Moon that didn’t make the cut as infamously among Transformers fans the ending of the film was altered at the last minute because of a mix-up at Amazon. Basically, for that film and both prior ones the early scripts were handed over to a comic book publisher called IDW who would turn the scripts into tie-in media and a comic book adaptation that wouldn’t perfectly match the final film that would release in cinemas. These comic books still contained spoilers though, and as such were released in the weeks following the release of the film, at least that was the plan. By the time that Dark of the Moon’s adaptation rolled around Amazon – the main online distributor of these comics – was experimenting with a feature allowing users to preview select pages of novels.
An error was made in which the preview pages for the adaptation were made available before the product was even for sale, with spoilers such as Sentinel Prime’s betrayal and Optimus Prime coming to a truce with Megatron being revealed in the process. When Michael Bay found out about this, he was furious, but it was too late in the game to alter anything besides the ending. What originally occurred was that when Megatron offers Optimus Prime the truce, Optimus accepts it, and the two go on to kill Sentinel with his own cosmic rust cannon. Following this, Megatron drives off and Optimus delivers his speech. In the version we actually got, Optimus rejects the truce, instead deciding to rip out Megatron’s spine. Following this, he executes Sentinel with a shotgun at point-blank range, then delivers his speech.
The first version functioned as a closing to the final chapter, but the second functioned as really just a cliffhanger. This was troubling for Paramount Pictures as Michael Bay and Shia LaBeouf had gone on record in interviews saying they were done with the Transformers franchise and wouldn’t be taking part in any more sequels. Paramount immediately set out to find a new director and leading man, but as for Ehren Kruger, he was very much returning. Kruger described what Transformers 4 looked like under these state of affairs during an interview with Collider, saying:
“There was a version of it which was different when we weren't sure if Michael was going to come back and direct it and then the mandate would have been for something that was probably less expensive of a movie and that would have had the same themes, but it would have been a different animal. Then once Michael fully committed saying he wanted to still play in this sandbox, he's always going to try and top himself. So the smaller version pretty much went away. It always dealt with Dinobots, it always dealt with KSI organization.”
Luckily for Paramount, Michael Bay came around asking for a studio to fund his movie Pain & Gain. Paramount agreed to fund it, but under one condition: Michael would have to direct Transformers 4 as his next project. Michael Bay agreed to these terms with little pushback, later explaining to Collider that he had already wanted to come back:
“I went to the ride, and I saw a three-hour line. It was around the f**kin’ block. You see all these kids and families, and then I went to the one in Singapore, and I’m like, “F**k!” To just hand this over to somebody? You know what I’m saying? What I want to do is really set it up and … the bottom line, if someone would take it over, you would get a director who doesn’t do a lot of these movies, you’ll probably get a B star, you know what I’m saying? So, on Pain & Gain, it kinda came together. We started working on a script, and then by bringing Mark on this, that’s what made it fun for me. It’s a better way to set it up.”
On that note about working on the script for Transformers 4 during the filming of Pain & Gain, Kruger expanded upon what those discussions looked like in multiple interview, saying:
“Well, we agreed very early on that there's so much rich mythology to the Transformer universe that we didn't want the movies going forward to fall into kind of a predictable pattern of there are good Autobots and there are bad Decepticons and there's some issue that they're fighting over and they fight. We thought there's so much more potentially to explore than that, so early on we started talking about themes of creation and origin stories, and that led us to thematically kind of into wanting to explore the origins of the Transformers themselves and Optimus and whether sentient alien robots were the thing that were intended or whether that was someone else's plan gone awry.”
“That was something where once Michael decided he wanted to do the movie, he definitely didn't want to follow another teenage protagonist. He felt he had captured lightning in a bottle with Shia LaBeouf, and he wasn't going to find another actor to provide that, male or female. You know, Michael has matured too over the course of this time. So when we talked about it vectoring into the franchise from a totally different human perspective, it was Michael who had the instinct early on to say that there was a father-daughter story to tell. Prior to that we had talked about themes of creation and origin stories on Earth and the notion of man-made Transformer technology. We didn't have our human story at the beginning and Michael really sparked to that relationship. He was right to do so. Once he brought that up and we started talking, it became clear the film was going to have two protagonists, with Cade and Optimus both in sort of parental roles, defending their families. It gave it a spine.”
“We wanted some sense of continuity in terms of the previous films. Those films exist in this universe. But we did want to come at it from the perspective of new human characters, and new Autobot characters around Optimus Prime, who kind of vectored into the franchise from a totally different direction. And it is kind of its own thing. It is sort of a reboot, and sort of a fourth movie, or third sequel. It's its own animal, but this franchise has always been its own animal. It's as much a circus or a Super Bowl as a regular movie.”
Michael Bay gave some insight into the decision to set the beginning of the film in Texas along with the inception of the KSI and CIA angle of the film in an interview with Collider, saying:
"I wanted to go back to more down-home. They wanted me not to go to Texas, and I said, “F*ck it. I’m going to Texas.” There’s a shot of Texas because there’s no more down-home place, you know what I’m saying? I wanted this really simple life … the idea was to start with an innocent, simple life and they’re just going on a ride that takes them to such a different world. My thing was, you can’t just … we couldn’t go around just replacing the kids, you know what I’m saying? So my idea was to backdoor it, kind of like have the father who’s a thinker, you know, Mark, and then we’ll introduce the kids that way. No matter who you brought in, they’re just going to compare him to Shia, and Shia was just like lightning in a bottle, because he’s just that … back then, he was just that funny … he was the only kid who could do stuff like that."
“I’ve always been fascinated by the CIA. Stanley’s character literally came from like, we had the raid with the helicopter, and we tried to get the tail, and whatever … that’s exactly what would happen in Chicago. What would he do if there was a spaceship over there and a kid took a robot hand? Imagine the war’s over. There’s sh*t everywhere. They’re gonna take that sh*t, and people are going to figure out how the hell is this stuff made, how is it engineered, and try to reverse engineer it.”
To summarize this information, the vision for the future of the Transformers franchise was to:
- Soft-reboot it while still maintaining continuity with the prior films.
- Have humans attempt to reverse engineer Cybertronian technology.
- Don’t have the conflict revolve purely around Autobots and Decepticons fighting.
- Explore the origins of the Transformers themselves and base it around whether their sentience was intended or if it was a bug that the creators seek to remove.
All of this is certainly present in the end product, Transformers: Age of Extinction, which exhibited these traits by featuring:
- An all-new cast of humans and Transformers, with the exception of Optimus Prime and Bumblebee who by then had become staples of the franchise.
- The company Kinetic Solutions Incorporated who’ve been granted a special government contract providing them with direct access to alien technology recovered in Chicago. KSI is shown to have broken down the Transformers to a molecular level, rebuilding them better from the ground up with a stabilized version of the metal they’re made of.
- An army of knockoff Transformers to serve as third act antagonists instead of another army of Decepticons, even though the knockoff army is led by Megatron reincarnate.
- A new overarching set of antagonists called “The Creators” who plot against Optimus Prime in the far reaches of the cosmos by sending Lockdown to capture him.
The film ended with a promise that in the sequel Optimus Prime would find his creators in the aforementioned far reaches of the cosmos and confront them, with this promise being conveyed through Optimus flying out of Earth’s atmosphere while sending a message to the Creators saying that he’s coming for them. With all this setup for a sequel, it might come as a surprise that a new Transformers trilogy had not yet been greenlit, rather the studio was waiting for the response from fans before making anything official. This news was imparted by series producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura who told IGN that:
"We're not planning on doing a trilogy." It's really a one-movie-at-a-time philosophy. It feels a little arrogant. Both Michael Bay and I feel like it's a little arrogant of us to presume success each time. We know our fans are really out there and they're going to come, so we presume a certain amount of success. But all the energy will be thrown into the next movie, if we're lucky enough to get there."
Lorenzo was also hesitant to make any promises about that Transformers 5 could end up looking like, responding to a question about whether the film would take place entirely in space by saying:
"We've debated space. We've debated whether we should ever shoot anything in space or not, and I don't think we've come to that conclusion. There are attractive notions to it, and unattractive. I think the unattractive, or the trick of it, is that we want our humans with us. So going to space might force an all-Transformers movie, and while I think some fans would love that, I think other fans would be disappointed they don't have humans. So I think that's the creative decision we've got to face about that idea."
Even Ehren Kruger seemed to have been ordered by the studio to not make any promises about whether he’d even be writing on Transformers 5, saying this across multiple interviews:
“Should the audience want a film to go forward with more stories, we definitely talked about how this film needs to set those up. There's such an amazing mythology of Transformers, much more than just Autobots versus Decepticons. So we're very happy with the mythology that we've set up in this movie, and if it's successful we'll certainly deliver on the promise that this film ends with.”
“We're writing for this movie in terms of the human story and in terms of coming up with the set pieces and visuals, in terms of the Transformer universe we've had a lot of conversations about where we'd like to go going forward. Assuming the fans respond to this movie and assuming it's successful we're certainly laying the building blocks for some other stories we have in the back of our heads.”
“I have a Transformers 5 in my head. Whether that will be what Transformers 5 is or I will work on it, who knows at this point?”
What was going on here? Why make promises for a sequel in your movie, but at the same time refuse to make promises in interviews about said movie? It’s hard to say, though considering that Age of Extinction is the lowest rated entry in the franchise, that may have factored into what was about to take place within Paramount Pictures. The film had turned out to be very successful and got close to out-grossing Dark of the Moon, but this seemingly wasn't enough.
The Reign of Akiva Goldsman
Despite in 2014 Paramount Pictures announcing that Transformers 5 was happening and that it would release in the summer of 2016, plans changed. Paramount became dissatisfied with the premise of just making another trilogy after witnessing the juggernaut that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was becoming, wanting to replicate this success with their own cinematic universe of interconnected films. Ehren Kruger’s thoughts on this have never been voiced, though he continued to work for Paramount, continuing on to write the screenplay for Ghost in the Shell and Top Gun: Maverick for the studio. He never returned to Transformers following Age of Extinction, however, as a new creative head was put in charge of the franchise. This head being that of Akiva Goldsman.
The genius behind the scripts of such classics as Batman & Robin and I, Robot now had full reign over the franchise, and he got right to work. He was soon collaborating directly with franchise director Michael Bay, along with executive producer Steven Spielberg and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, to organize a writer's room that would work to create a ten-year plan for an interconnected Transformers cinematic universe. This writer's room included Christina Hodson, Ken Nolan, Andrew Barrer, Gabriel Ferrari, Robert Kirkman, Zak Penn, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, Jeff Pinkner, and Steven DeKnight. When asked by Deadline about why he started the writer’s room, Goldsman answered:
“It just felt like such fertile ground and a rich environment for storytelling, and there has already been thoughtful work done long before any of us came into the room,” Goldsman said. “We will be innovative miners, and we will have fun and get to do what we imagined this was all about when we were kids.”
Goldsman turned out to be right on the money about his team being innovative, as Transformers: The Last Knight became the first live-action Transformers film to flop at the box office, pulling in $100 million less than the first entry had a decade prior. How did this happen? Well, let’s just go through how the film diverged from the new identity of the franchise and betrayed audiences expectations by making a list for it just like what was done for Age of Extinction before it. The film:
- Did another soft-reboot, but this one failed to maintain continuity with the prior films.
- Featured Cade Yeager as the only one reverse-engineering Cybertronian technology.
- Made the Decepticons the main antagonists again while acting like that was never not the case.
- Included Quintessa because the writers had to address the Creators thing, but she's the exact opposite of everything the Creators were said to be, and on top of that, the sentience of the Transformers is something she brought into existence on purpose.
This is not why the film failed, rather it was because of the disjointed script and awful directing, but subconsciously these things played a role too. Goldsman betrayed what general audiences had come to see the Transformers as, and when they didn’t recognize what was being shown to them in the promotional material of The Last Knight, they didn’t show up to theaters. The cinematic universe never materialized and Akiva Goldsman left Transformers to instead drive the brand of Star Trek into the ground with Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The most recent projects to have attributed writing credits to him were the Stephen King adaptation-remake Firestarter and the Tom Holland led Apple TV+ limited series The Crowded Room. Neither managed to make it over a 33% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Transformers: Return of the Gods
A source on 4chan made a post in 2021 claiming knowledge of the many cancelled Transformers films. Regarding Ehren Kruger's Transformers 5, this was written:
"Transformers 5 : Return of the Gods Sequel for Age of Extinction Penned by Ehren Kruger, it was going to reveal the Quintessons and have Galvatron as main villain on Earth Optimus Prime would still become Nemesis Prime, movie would end on a cliffhanger with evil Optimus One storyline going on Earth with Bumblebee as leader and in space with Optimus finding his creators Got mixed with two other scripts resulting in The Last Knight Guardian Knights would have appeared with introduction of Unicron as big bad for sixth film Krueger intended the film to have a cohesive story compared to Age of Extinction and focus more on Cybertron origins Cade would return as lead No WWII stuff"
Is there any truth to this? Well, nobody connected to Paramount has referenced any of this, so... NO.
Sources to Dispel Claims of Misinformation
https://collider.com/transformers-5-ehren-kruger-interview/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/transformers-age-of-extinction-ehren-kruger_n_5537322
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdeAExtmSV0
https://collider.com/michael-bay-transformers-age-of-extinction-interview/
https://www.slashfilm.com/532542/transformers-logical-sense/
https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/06/20/transformers-trilogy-not-set-in-stone
https://in.ign.com/entertainment/4184/news/producer-speculates-on-transformers-in-space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers:_The_Last_Knight
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/firestarter_2022