Buzz off, humans: Transformers fans want more of Bumblebee and company.
By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY
When giant alien robots disguised as vehicles show up and start smashing things including box-office records the natural reaction is: What comes next?
DreamWorks/Paramount clearly have sequel ambitions for Transformers, which has earned $155.4 million since opening last week.
A rich back story that the Michael Bay film only hinted at can provide endless material for follow-up films, and the rich ticket sales guarantee the studio will want to make them.
"We're waiting to hear what the fans want in that second movie and avoid the trap of what some movies get into," says Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.
So far, what moviegoers say they want is more robots.
From the king movie geek Harry Knowles of AintItCool.com to newspaper film critics and regular Joe (and Jane) comments, there is general raving about the mechanical heroes and general grumbling about the excessive screen time given to some of the human characters played by Shia LaBeouf, Anthony Anderson, Tyrese Gibson and Jon Voight.
Optimus Prime, the leader of the good-guy Autobots, doesn't appear until midway through the film, and the personalities of the robots themselves (the rookie mistakes of Bumblebee, the double-crossing of villain Starscream) are given short shrift.
Ryan Yzquierdo, 30, of Chicago, who runs the fan site Seibertron.com, hopes producers will trust the appeal of the robots' personalities.
"I would totally love to see more robot interaction. Most of those characters don't get any development time at all," says Yzquierdo, who has seen the film six times. "With a sequel, they have the opportunity to develop more with the Transformer characters and push that as far as it can go."
Producers say they understand.
"The honest answer is if we're lucky enough to make another one, we would push to get more underneath the skin of these guys," says di Bonaventura, though he believes the humans were important to draw in those not familiar with the robot mythology.
One guy ready for more action is Optimus Prime himself, voiced by Peter Cullen. "(Producer) Don Murphy mentioned to me, 'Only because of the tremendous expense to animate Optimus Prime, he'll be in just a certain amount of things.' But he said, 'Next time, if the movie is a success, you're gonna be in it a ton.' "
Producer Tom DeSanto says some special-effects techniques developed for the film can be used in a sequel.
"It's not like we need to go out and have that expense again of 'How does Optimus Prime transform?' with 10,000 moving parts," he says. "So in the future that expense doesn't have to be prohibitive."
Di Bonaventura cautions, however: "We always think that, and then find out it's not true. These things are always going to be very expensive, and we'll always want them to do more."
t:
also doesn't the prequel novel make it pretty clear that Starscream does NOT want Megatron to be found?
We had more decepticons then autobots in the first one, do you mean you want to see more Autobots, or more Decepticon development?
