Transformers' yellow Autobot Bumblebee looks like he's getting his own standalone movie.
Last May, Paramount announced plans for a sort of Transformers shared cinematic universe, with large-scale mash-ups punctuated by smaller annual films.
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Now, in a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount CEO Brad Grey appeared to confirm that Bumblebee will star in the first of these spinoffs.
"There are characters in the Transformers universe that can be and should be made into their own movies," Grey said. "We will make the first movie with Michael and go right into a Bumblebee movie, which will be at a lower cost."
By "the first movie" he of course means Transformers 5 - plus whatever subtitle it acquires - which is due to hit screens in June 2017.That would mean that the Bumblebee movie would follow on June 8, 2018, followed by some other spin-off in 2019.
The "lower cost" bit is intriguing; it means that this film might be more like the original cartoon adventures, with a robot-turned-car helping a young person out with some sort of mystery, rather than averting a global apocalypse.
Can a model that works for Marvel, and which may yet work for Star Wars, also succeed for these robots in disguise?
The series has experienced declining box office results since the high water mark of the second film Revenge of the Fallen, with Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction both making less.
But even the fourth film made $1bn worldwide, and if a lower-budget spin-off can make anywhere near that, we're going to be watching a lot more of these.
