Forget Iron Fist, something even bigger and arguably better (but not by much) is going to make a big splash at San Diego Comic-Con later this month: The Transformers. According to Deadline, the series will have its first panel ever at the event’s famous Hall H venue this year for director Travis Knight’s Bumblebee spin-off/prequel/maybe reboot. Along with Knight, the panel will feature stars Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., and maybe even the big yellow Autobot himself if we’re lucky—though it seems like it would be hard to get a Cybertronian the size of a Volkswagen through a convention center without anyone noticing. Maybe if this were a spin-off about one of the smaller Transformers, like Frenzy or Wheelie, then they’d be able to pull it off.
Knight will probably show a new trailer or some footage for Bumblebee at the panel, since the movie comes out on December 21 and there isn’t a whole lot else for him to do other than answer questions. It’s possible he or someone else from Paramount will drop teases about the future of the Transformers series, which supposedly included at least 14 potential sequels and spin-offs as of last year (with one of them being Bumblebee). The Marvel movies are skipping Comic-Con this year, so Transformers could steal a little bit of their cinematic universe thunder by announcing some kind of G.I. Joe crossover, but we’re getting a little stressed out just at the idea of disappointing two fanbases instead of one.
Anyway, the Bumblebee panel will be held on July 20, and if anyone reading this gets in the audience and has an opportunity to ask Knight a question, see if he can explain how Bumblebee fits in with the established canon from the Michael Bay movies, like how Bumblebee and some other Autobots fought in WWII even though the government apparently didn’t know they existed until they found Megatron in the arctic. The original Transformers cartoon was not hard to follow, so it’s Bay and Paramount’s fault that they turned the movies into such a ridiculous cornucopia of crap that they can’t even stick to a consistent version of world history in them.