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

polygon.com:

Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura knows how to roll the dice. During a tenure as an executive at Warner Bros. Pictures, he snatched up the film rights to Harry Potter and threw an exorbitant budget at two indie filmmakers to make something called — checks notes — “The Matrix.” When he went independent in the 2000s, di Bonaventura lured none other than Michael Bay to take the long-gestating Transformers over the finish line. Cut to 16 years and seven sequels later, and the producer is still gambling on the robots in disguise.

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

Rise of the Beasts had its own gamble: While di Bonaventura says his team wanted to add the Maximals, the animal-like Autobots who took off in the ’90s Beast Wars cartoon, into the core franchise for years, they couldn’t crack a story that would actually work. “Naturally, animals and cars don’t mix,” he says. “They can’t go into an urban environment, they’d be a little obvious. There’s no robot in disguise for them in an urban environment.” The fix was a prequel-sequel, squeezed between the core Bay movies and the ’80s-set Bumblebee, that 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 follow-up play; 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 its next gamble on the franchise. This time it’s built right into