For all intents and purposes, every sign points to Michael Bay and the Transformers series going their separate ways after The Last Knight. Bay even wrote a goodbye letter to the franchise thanking everyone involved for five movies’ worth of explosions, robots fighting each other, and female characters introduced from the legs up. But there’s one person who thinks he might be faking it.
Transformers: The Last Knight has everything: bad Optimus Prime, King Arthur, planets crashing into other planets, giant flying machines, a robot dinosaur (hey there, Grimlock), Anthony Hopkins somehow taking it all seriously. A new clip featured on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, introduces Hopkins’ character, along with Laura Haddock as an Oxford professor, and their loyal assistant Cogman(!).
With the recent announcement that Transformers: The Last Knight would be hitting theaters two days earlier — moving from Friday, June 23 to Wednesday, June 21 — fans are closer than ever to seeing their favorite Autobots (and humans) throw down against a reluctantly evil Optimus Prime. This is the summer of heel turns by beloved franchise characters; first we saw Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto betray his family in The Fate of the Furious, and now we’re counting down the days until Optimus Prime stabs Bumblebee in the face. Rough summer for heroes, it would seem.
As people weigh in on the popularity of Marvel and DC movies, they sometimes neglect to mention the opportunities these films create for non-superhero comic books. For every Logan, there’s a handful of smaller titles — movies like American Splendor, Ghost World, and Scott Pilgrim — that benefit from the overall popularity of the medium. Ryan Gosling, for example, recently signed on to produce a film adaptation of independent graphic novel The Underwater Welder, a melancholy story of fatherhood and mortality. Any filmmaker or actor seeking out their next comic book movie need only spend a few hours at their local library branch to see the full scope of the medium.