Giant Freakin Robot

Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm has been the big story over the past week. The deal adds the Star Wars franchise to Disney’s entertainment empire that already boasts entertainment big guns such as Pixar and Marvel. But while we’re all busy speculating about what Episode VII will look like when it arrives in 2015, there’s a new rumor floating around that the House of Mouse has yet another major entity in its sights: Hasbro, which would give them properties such as the Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Dungeons and Dragons.

Today is Halloween, and if you’re dressing up as something, you probably already have your costume picked out and hopefully put together. If not, there’s always next year. It’s never too soon to start planning, and given a year’s worth of lead time, you should be able come up with something pretty damn epic. For instance, how about a 10-foot-tall, flame-shooting costume of the Transformers‘ Bumblebee?

That’s right: if you live around the greater Phoenix area, and have somewhere in the neighborhood of $9000 burning a hole in your pocket, the Bumblebee costume could be yours. This is your chance to fulfill your greatest childhood fantasy of becoming a goddamned Transformer. That’s the dream.

Talk about classless. Actor Hugo Weaving recently sounded off on voicing the role of Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons in the Transformers films. He wasn’t happy taking the role, so he expressed his distaste for the job and the film series, and how he considers this kind of work as “meaningless.” This angered the director of the film series, Michael Bay, who sounded off against the Australian actor.

In an interview with Collider.com, Weaving talked about his upcoming role in the Wachowskis’ & Tom Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas. While discussing the project with Christina Radish, Weaving talked about his work on all three of the Transformers films.

That’s a weird job for me because it honestly was a two-hour voice job, initially. I was doing a play and I actually didn’t have time, anyway. It was one of the only things I’ve ever done where I had no knowledge of it, I didn’t care about it, I didn’t think about it. They wanted me to do it. In one way, I regret that bit. I don’t regret doing it, but I very rarely do something if it’s meaningless. It was meaningless to me, honestly. I don’t mean that in any nasty way. I did it. It was a two-hour voice job, while I was doing other things. Of course, it’s a massive film that’s made masses of money. I just happened to be the voice of one of the iconic villainous characters. But, my link to that and to Michael Bay is so minimal. I have never met him. I was never on set. I’ve seen his face on Skype. I know nothing about him, really. I just went in and did it. I never read the script. I just have my lines, and I don’t know what they mean. That sounds absolutely pathetic! I’ve never done anything like that, in my life. It’s hard to say any more about it than that, really.

It looks like Michael Bay might be extending his time with the Transformers franchise longer than we expected. With the movies inexplicably having made a couple billion dollars, it’s no surprise that Paramount and Hasbro would want to keep churning them out. I mean, hell, it’s not like anyone will notice if you shoot one without an actual screenplay. Just have robots punch each other for ninety minutes, boom, box office gold. Since the next Transformers flick is said to be a semi-reboot that will ditch all the human cast members and bring in a new crop of folks to start fresh, it would make sense that Bay might have made a graceful exit during the transition, but he eventually decided to stay onboard for the fourth film…and possibly even a fifth.

The news of a possible fifth film comes from actor Glenn Morshower, who has been in all three of the Transformers movies. During an interview with Examiner.com at Kansas City’s Con X KC, Morshower said that Bay and Steven Spielberg, who executive produces the Transformers films, are working on two more installments of the franchise. Morshower recounted a run-in with Spielberg after the actor had recorded a segment for Universal Studios’ Transformers 3D ride: