It would appear that movie franchises are the way to get money from audiences, and Hasbro wants to milk the franchise of the live-action Transformers movie with a few more films, with the next to be released next year with Transformers: The Last Knight. This is what is known about Transformers 5 with its release date, cast, and the long-term plan for Hasbro.
According to Yibada, there will be some returning characters, and they will be human ones. With Transformers: Age of Extinction, all of the human characters were completely removed and in their place was Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and his supporting cast.
Now returning to their roles is Josh Duhamel as William Lennox and Tyrese Gibson as Robert Epps. Most of you remember these characters from the first Transformers films, as they were the military characters in the film. They were absent in the fourth movie, but they were working with the Autobots with NEST (Non-Biological Extraterrestrial Species Treaty) for films two and three.
Also added to the film is Isabela Moner, a 14-year-old who has done some Nickelodeon projects. According to Cinemablend, she is "a street smart tomboy who grew up an orphan and was raised in foster care. She counts a small Transformer as her only friend...until she meets Wahlberg's heroic inventor Cade Yeager".
There is going to be another human character added, presumably. According to the film's IMDB page, none other than the acting veteran Anthony Hopkins is joining the cast. I say presumably, because there isn't any indicator of who he will be playing, so he could be one of the robots or one of the human characters. I'm guessing a human character because he does not have (voice) by his name, but there is no designated character name for him at all.
While we are on the subject of human characters, hopefully, the writers will finally correct something that really needs to happen in the Transformers live-action film series. The issue is that the story focuses on the humans, with the robots as more background characters. It was Shia LaBoeuf's character Sam Witwicky in the first three films, and it looks like Cade Yeager is the one who the story follows.
The issue is that following the humans is really veering away from the source material of the animated series, which was about the robots and focused on the robots as the main characters. The human characters were the side characters on the original animated series, barely seen in the conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons. Granted, telling the story from the human POV allows the audience the chance to see how the humans are responding to giant alien robots fighting on Earth, which was barely brought up in the original Transformers series.
So yes, start the next film with the Transformers and follow them throughout the movie. By the way, there are going to be several more of these Transformers movies. Apparently, Hasbro has some long-term plan of a connected universe with these films, all connected to toys that came out in the eighties. I've said before that The Last Knight in the title could be related to ROM Spacekinight, and there will be other toys like G.I. Joe, MASK, and much more. Eventually, there will probably be an Avengers-style of film that will bring all these Hasbro intellectual properties together, and that could be like a kid playing with all of his toys all at once.
Transformers 5 or Transformers: The Last Knight will hit theaters on June 23, 2017, but as far as the long-term plan is concerned, there isn't many words on the plan for more Hasbro films.
