Six years ago, we heard that Ant-Man co-writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari had joined a writers room that was put together to develop an animated Transformers project called Transformers One, which “would take place on the Autobots and Decepticon’s home planet of Cybertron.” Three years ago, Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley signed on to take the helm of the film. Now, Deadline reports that a voice cast has been assembled for Transformers One… and it has some serious star power.
Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Brian Tyree Henry (Eternals) are providing the voices of Optimus Prime and Megatron, respectively, and they’re joined in the voice cast by Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) as Elita, Keegan-Michael Key (The Predator) as Bumblebee, Jon Hamm (Mad Men) as Sentinel Prime, and Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix) as Alpha Trion.
Scripted by Barrer and Ferrari, Transformers One will tell the story of how a young Optimus Prime (Hemsworth) and Megatron (Henry) went from being brothers-in-arms to sworn enemies.
Ramsey Naito, President, Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Animation, had this to say about the project: “I’m so excited and proud to be working with Hasbro and eOne to bring the first animated Transformers movie in almost 40 years to theaters for a never-before-told story. I’m honored to have such incredible talents come together to portray these well-known and much-loved characters in an origin story at the heart of the franchise.“
Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura previously told Collider, “If you know the origin, (Optimus Prime and Megatron) started as friends, and over time things devolved for them and they ended up on two sides. So we’re telling the young Optimus and the young Megatron story. We really are telling the origin story of all Transformers, both what they were at the beginning of it, to how they grow, to how they grow apart… We’re not there for a short time, we’re there the entire time of the movie, we’re on Cybertron, but we are in the challenge that, if you know the lore, they begin to question the hierarchy of how their society has gotten stratified, and how the common man doesn’t have the voice, entirely, that they want to have. We’re following very true to the origin story of it, and so it’s really fun, too, because I’ve gotten to see some of it – it’s not fully executed by any stretch of the imagination, but hearing Optimus and Megatron not as who we know them as, which we see their maturation in this experience. So, in a sense, you’re hearing a different character because you’re hearing them before they have matured.“
Coming our way from Paramount Animation, Hasbro, and eOne, Transformers One is set to reach theatres on July 19, 2024.
Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Tom DeSanto, Don Murphy, Michael Bay, Mark Vahradian, and Aaron Dem are producing the film. Steven Spielberg serves as an executive producer alongside Brian Goldner, Brian Oliver, Bradley J. Fischer, and Valerii An.
Are you interested in Transformers One? What do you think of the voice cast? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
