Don’t let the new cast fool you: Transformers: Age of Extinction will not seek to reset the Transformers movie universe.

It was over a year ago that director Michael Bay announced that Mark Wahlberg would take center stage in Transformers 4, replacing the recently retired Shia LaBeouf, who starred as Sam Witwicky in all three previous installments. At that time it was understood that the new script went in a considerably different direction than the other movies. What wasn’t known was how much the events of the first three films would carry over.


Despite Bay’s insistence that the movie would retain elements of the previous stories, some fans held out hope that that the new cast -- which also includes Nicola Peltz, Stanley Tucci and Kelsey Grammar -- meant that Age of Extinction would serve as a rapid reboot, much in the same way The Amazing Spider-Man departed from the previous Spider-Man trilogy. In a recent interview with THN, Age of Extinction producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura put all that to rest. Sort of.

“It’s definitely not a reboot. It’s an interesting question about what you should call it. On a certain level it’s a continuation of the previous stories, in the fact that it acknowledges what has transpired before it. It acknowledges in the last movie, the destruction of Chicago, it’s actually something that carries through the sort of emotional repercussions of that, not unlike 9/11 has emotional repercussions in the real world. In a fantasy world there are repercussions to what occurred.”

Di Bonaventura also said that the new human characters wouldn’t know anything about the previous characters, which seems to suggest a distinct storyline completely removed from the Witwicky saga. “The advantage of doing it this way,” he added, “is that it feels almost like a first movie.”

Transformers: Age of Extinction opens in the U.S. on June 27.

http://www.ign.com/videos/2014/01/21...s-not-a-reboot

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/02/04...ers-redesigned