Transformers’ G.I. Joe tease is absolutely ‘a promise’ for the next movie

Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura knows how to roll the dice. During a tenure as an executive at Warner Bros. Pictures, he grabbed the Harry Potter movie rights and threw an exorbitant budget at two independent filmmakers to make something called – checks notes – “The Matrix.” When he became independent in the 2000s, di Bonaventura enticed none other than Michael Bay to Transformers across the finish line. Cut back to 16 years and seven sequels later, and the producer is still betting on the robots in disguise.

“And the is a gamble,” says di Bonaventura to Polygon, as his new film, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, continues to roll out in theaters and digital platforms. “Every movie is a gamble and what you add or take away is a gamble.”

Rise of the Beasts had his own guess: while di Bonaventura says his team wanted to add the Maximals, the animal-like Autobots that took off in the ’90s Beast Wars cartoon, in the core franchise for years, they couldn’t crack a story that would actually work. “Of course animals and cars don’t mix,” he says. “They can’t go into an urban environment, that would be a bit obvious. In an urban environment, there is no disguised robot for them.” The solution was a prequel-sequel sandwiched between the main Bay movies and the 1980s set Bumblebeewho transplanted the action to Peru with an Indiana Jones relic-chasing twist.

The modest success of Bumblebee prompted di Bonaventura and Paramount Pictures to carefully weigh their sequel; it’s been five years since the Optimus-less one-off, and the yellow Autobot takes a bit of a backseat this time around. But the Transformers team isn’t waiting to take the next gamble on the franchise. This time it is built to the end of Rise of the Beastswhen the movie’s human hero Noah (Anthony Ramos) is recruited by none other than the GI Joes, who want the Autobots’ help for… something.

“[The G.I. Joe tease] is definitely a promise,” says di Bonaventura, when asked if the Easter egg is more than comrade in the water. “I’ve had a lot of questions about this and here’s my direct answer: We didn’t develop the script. So we don’t know exactly [how they fit in], but the answer is like in any other movie, a group of humans and robots fight against the bad guy to save the day. GI Joes will be part of that.”

The GI Joe’s were very much not around during the first Transformers movies (although you could easily mistake Josh Duhamel’s Autobot-affiliated attack team NEST for an offshoot), which raises the question of how they’ll suddenly team up with the Transformers in a future movie. Di Bonaventura says don’t worry, the team behind the series really cares about continuity. The producer notes Rise of the Beasts takes place in 1994 and the first Bay movie is set in 2007, giving them 13 years for the Joes and the Autobots to work together in secret.

“Continuity certainly matters,” di Bonaventura points out, comparing his approach to how Peter Jackson adapted the Lord of the Rings books. As a Tolkien fan, there were certainly things he missed and characters he wanted to see, but the dramatic effect of the adaptations was everything. “For me personally, I think [continuity’s] exaggerated, because sometimes you miss a great idea. […] I think one of the things I find particularly exciting about this movie is that you meet Optimus before he’s the character you met in Bay’s movies. There is definitely an evolution between the two things. To me that is not contradictory. You let in Optimus’ emotionality, his vulnerability.’

The gamble to break continuity does not always succeed. In an early encounter with Rise of the Beastsvillains, the Terrorcons, Optimus Prime… gets his ass handed to him by their leader, Scourge. Not every Autobot makes it out alive, but when Optimus gets back up, he is angry. Perhaps too infuriating for Optimus Prime purists.

“We had to dial it back a bit,” says di Bonaventura. “When we first showed it to an audience, there was a scene that was cut from the movie because we just didn’t need it. Optimus’ anger at being caught was so violent that they said: Whoa, that’s not Optimus Prime! But it was. And it was right. I think in some ways Optimus has the same problem as Superman, which is that you have to be careful if he just seems invulnerable, because then how interesting can he be? So I really like that he gets his ass in the first fight, and that builds up in the subsequent fights.

Putting on an epically scaled Transformers/GI Joe crossover event shouldn’t threaten the delicate fabric of the TF Cinematic Universe – there’s a long history of comics linking the two teams who have paved the way for this moment. But di Bonaventura knows he is still gambling. When I ask him to clarify how he envisions the crossover working, he draws specific lines that people who aren’t in charge of multi-billion dollar franchises might dread.

“They’ll be part of a Transformer group — we’re not entering GI Joe’s world, they’re entering ours,” says the producer. And as for the classic Joe characters established by movies like 2021’s Snake eyes? “Characters have to come in, I think.”

Just don’t expect Cobra Commander to hit Optimus Prime at difficult.