Filmmaker Josh Cooley is about to craft a completely different type of toy story.
Fresh off his Oscar win for Best Animated Feature with Disney•Pixar’s Toy Story 4, Cooley will direct an animated Transformers prequel that will reportedly take place on Cybertron and focus on the dynamic between Optimus Prime and Megatron. Originally reported by Deadline, Cooley took to Twitter to confirm the news with the heroic Autobots logo and two familiar words for Transformers fans: “Roll out.”
Roll out. pic.twitter.com/riVCLbHHYp
— Josh Cooley (@CooleyUrFaceOff) April 30, 2020
The new Transformers film will be separate from the previous live-action films and the recent Bumblebee spin-off. The film will be produced by eOne, the entertainment studio recently acquired by Transformers toymaker Hasbro, alongside Paramount Pictures, where Hasbro’s Allspark Pictures maintains a long-standing relationship.
Ahead of last year’s theatrical launch for Toy Story 4, Cooley made his love for vintage toys very clear, explaining to the Pop Insider why he populated the expanded world of Toy Story with fresh additions from the ’70s and ’80s.
“In the first Toy Story, characters such as Slinky Dog and Mr. Potato Head — those were real toys, and people almost forget that,” Cooley said. “In Toy Story 4, I wanted to see some things that I grew up with, and almost anyone my age grew up playing with Kenner Star Wars action figures.”
As reported yesterday in our sister publication, the Toy Book, eOne has approximately 100 TV projects in active development, including 15 from the Hasbro portfolio. A total of 21 projects from the Hasbro portfolio are in development for film adaptations, alongside 40 other theatrical productions.
While we wait to see how Cooley’s take on Transformers lore shapes up, YouTube user Ranger Re-Edits recently entered similar territory by rescoring the Cybertron sequence from 2018’s Bumblebee with the epic rock score from 1986’s Transformers: The Movie.
Photo: Hasbro
