The Transformers franchise is returning to its animated roots with Transformers: One, and now we know who’ll be lending their voice to the film.
The previously announced animated film directed by Toy Story 4‘s Josh Cooley just got a majorly stacked voice cast annoucement at CinemaCon 2023. Get ready for this line up of Robots in Disguise led by Marvel stars Chris Hemsworth as young Optimus Prime, Brian Tyree Henry as young Megatron, and Scarlett Johansson as Elita. They’re joined by Keegan-Michael Key as Bumblebee, Jon Hamm as Sentinel Prime, and Laurence Fishburne as Alpha Trion.
The film will tell the story of how Optimus Prime and Megatron started off as friends and became enemies on their home planet Cybertron. It aims to set up the origins of the beloved characters and how the war for the AllSpark began.
Longtime Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura previously told Collider about the project, “You’re going to see a lot of the origins of the society, and what broke it apart. The analogy for me is a bit like Krypton when you saw the planet falling apart, and all that. We’re not there for a short time, we’re there the entire time of the movie, we’re on Cybertron, but the challenge of that, if you know the lore, they begin to question the hierarchy of how their society has gotten stratified, and how the common man doesn’t have the voice, entirely, that they want to have. We’re following very true to the origin story of it, and so it’s really fun, too, because I’ve gotten to see some of it — it’s not fully executed by any stretch of the imagination, but hearing Optimus and Megatron not as who we know them as, which we see their maturation in this experience. So, in a sense, you’re hearing a different character because you’re hearing them before they have matured.”
Transformers: One will be released July 19, 2024.