Please No: Paramount Wants To Marvelize Transformers & Keep It Going Into Infinity

Look, I’m as for a good dinosaur alien robot as the next girl. But this worries me. From /Film and Deadline:

Deadline reports that Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning writer of a A Beautiful Mind (and the writer of Batman and Robin, among other films) is in negotiations with Paramount to lead a brain trust of writers with the aim of upping the output of Transformers movies for the studio. Goldsman will join executive producers Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg and Lorenzo di Bonaventura in the hiring of a collection of writers to create “a potential multi-part Transformers sequel, and come up with potential spinoff films.”

The reason so many studios are lusting after the Marvel model is obvious: Marvel makes (to put it eloquently) mad bank literally anytime it puts anything in theaters, and the MCU is revolutionary in a lot of ways — of course it would be changing the environment around it. But it’s the latter that also makes the copycatting of the Marvel ways so ill-advised: Marvel’s plan is thorough and spans decades, and looks more like showrunning a massive a billion-dollar-budgeted TV series than the typical Hollywood model of making sequel after sequel after sequel. As HitFitx Harpy’s Donna Dickens noted:

Marvel literally had a 20 year plan. The MCU was a slow burn at first. All these shared-universes-come-lately want to sprint out the gate.

— Donna Dickens (@MildlyAmused) March 27, 2015

And, of course, sequels and tie-ins are no new thing and certainly weren’t invented by Marvel. But right now it sometimes feels like we’re looking into a future built entirely off of the umpteenth sequels and spinoffs of franchises already in place. That’s hyperbole, of course, and not all of those sequels and spinoffs are stale or even derivative. There’s great potential buried in there. But I don’t know, guys, I am just not feeling this. And I do think it’s time we (and Hollywood) had a real convo about what so many connected universes can/do/should/could mean.

What are your thoughts?

(Image via Paramount Pictures)

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