'Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts' Director Steven Caple Jr. Wants To Tap Back Into The Heart Of The Franchise

Today, Paramount Pictures announced Transformers: Rise of the Beasts as the next installment of the toy-inspired blockbuster film franchise that began back in 2007. While Bumblebee offered a smaller scale Transformers story a few years ago, this latest chapter will ramp things up by diving into the war between new kinds of Transformers that we haven't seen on the big screen yet. But outside of the blockbuster bot battles, director Steven Caple Jr. plans to bring a healthy dose of humor and heart to the action spectacle. 

Producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura said Transformers: Rise of the Beasts will be on the scale of the Michael Bay movies. But it will also have the heart of Bumblebee and the dynamic between Shia LaBeouf's character and the Autobot heroes of the Transformers franchise, something that was missing from the sequels that followed the original 2007 movie.

Di Bonaventura saw that Steven Caple Jr. had "the DNA" of Transformers within him. As a kid, Caple (who is best known for directing Creed II) grew up on the original animated Transformers movie on VHS, and even watched the computer animated Beast Wars series that debuted around the time he was a teenager. Combine that with a desire to inject some heart and humor back into the series through the human element of the story, and you've got the right kind of filmmaker to usher in a new era of Transformers movies.

Anthony Ramos, who is starring in the film with Dominique Fishback, recalled a conversation he had with Steven Caple Jr. during development. The filmmaker asked the In the Heights star what his goals were in taking on this blockbuster role, and Ramos' answer lined up with the kind of humanity that Caple wants to bring back into the Transformers franchise. The actor said:

"I thought that was such a good question. It was so direct. And it immediately made me want to bring heart to this character. The number one priority for me was: Humans. Why are they there? Because if not, then you can just make a movie about robots. That's the goal, right? This character, Noah specifically, his journey, we need that guy. There is no movie without that character. And the same goes for Dom as Elena. We need her. We need Elena. That was my answer to Steven. Bring the heart."

So it sounds like Caple and his stars are hoping to make the human characters matter more than they might have in the grand scheme of the Transformers franchise up until now.

Back when Michael Bay tackled the first Transformers franchise, executive producer Steven Spielberg was convinced to get involved when he was told that it was a story about a boy and his first car that just so happened to be a transforming robot from space. Bumblebee followed that formula to much greater success than any of the previous Transformers sequels, so hopefully Caple will follow suit by not letting the blockbuster spectacle run away with the show. Just because this is a movie about giant robots at war doesn't mean it has to be as cold as the metal they're made of.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is set to open on June 24, 2022.