Optimus Prime, meet King Arthur. Arthur, Optimus.
That robot-legendary king meet-up is exactly what might happen in Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth movie in Michael Bay”s franchise, set to open in June 2017.
JoBlo claims to have the scoop on some of the story details for the movie, and it”s got Arthurian legend staking out a place in the movie world of the Hasbro toys. Here”s what the JoBlo post reports:
The story for Transformers: The Last Knight will involve Optimus Prime finding his home planet, Cybertron, now a dead planet, which he comes to find he was responsible for killing. He finds a way to bring the planet back to life, but in order to do so he needs to find an artifact. And of course, that artifact is on Earth. What is that artifact? Well, here”s where things get weird.
Somehow the artifact ties into Merlin, the magician of King Arthur lore. Apparently, the power of magic was given to Merlin by a Transformer and somehow the artifact ties into this. As far as what the artifact is, we can”t say, but I wouldn”t be surprised if it has something to do with the famed sword Excaliber (I mean, they did make sure to include a sword in the new logo, didn't they?). That”s just speculation on my part, but it sounds reasonable.
Then Paul Shirey at JoBlo says something about how we”ve already seen the effects of time travel on the Transformers movies. I guess I missed that? The Transformers comics and animated series, though, have featured some time travel – including a 1985 episode called “A Deception Raider in King Arthur”s Court.”
Rumble, Ravage, Starscream, and Ramjet get transported to 543 A.D. in the episode, which doesn”t actually draw much from Arthurian legend, though there is a princess character named Nimue (a.k.a. the Lady of the Lake).
So time travel and/or ancient Arthurian artifacts may not be as much of a far-fetched left-turn for the Transformers movies (though “far-fetched” is a relative term in a world where alien mechanical life forms exist).
The Last Knight subtitle might refer to a knight of the Round Table. Or, as my colleague Drew McWeeny pointed out to me, it may have something to do with ROM, Spaceknight. Paramount and Hasbro are pushing to get other properties like ROM into a shared cinematic universe.
Oh, and maybe this is what Sir Anthony Hopkins is doing in a Transformers movie. We may have to forgive him for this questionable career choice if he”s playing Arthur or Merlin or some reincarnated knight.