Are Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts & Bumblebee Set In The Same Universe?

"Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" is speeding towards its release this week, giving audiences the seventh installment of the live-action "Transformers" series. Following the dismal end to the Michael Bay-led films, Paramount gave the franchise a soft reboot with 2018's "Bumblebee," and "Rise of the Beasts" looks to continue the story from there. 

"It's a reboot for sure," director Steven Caple Jr. told the YouTube channel The Alfonso Nation, saying that "Rise of the Beasts" plays with a loose "Transformers" canon. "You can still watch the Bay-verse and be on your own verse, so to speak. With us, we're definitely like, 'We want this to work.' It's a refresher, so we can call it a reboot in terms of, like, where we were starting, but it's definitely a new direction, for sure." 

While the "Transformers" franchise moves away from Bay's films, Caple Jr. is hesitant to write them off completely, saying there are minor connections that fans can make between "Rise of the Beasts" and previous installments, like Bumblee. "Clearly, B is a huge connection to all of the movies, but it's a very small one in terms of the big ideas that we have," he said, teasing that fans should be excited to see the direction they're taking "Transformers" when "Rise of the Beasts" rolls credits.

The "Transformers" timeline is getting a little convoluted for general audiences, and now with seven films, the order in which to watch the "Transformers" movies will change with each installment. That's because "Bumblebee," the prequel set in 1987, takes place before all of Michael Bay's films, and "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" continues that story with a 1994 setting.

"We were thinking of it as a progression," Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer of "Rise of the Beasts," told Collider. "'Bumblebee' was in 1987, so then how do we move it forward and also not run into the timeline of the Bay films?" Director Steven Caple Jr. added that he's a fan of all the "Transformers" movies but loved that "Bumblebee" took the series back to the '80s. "It adds nostalgia and something that people remember and connect to," he said. "So, I was curious where we'd be picking this thing up from, and Lorenzo said 1994."

From the sound of things, neither Di Bonaventura nor Caple Jr. is writing off Bay's films as non-canon, but instead, the rebooted series will work in the time periods leading up to those movies. This creative decision works best for the franchise, as it doesn't alienate fans of Bay's films while giving new filmmakers a relatively blank slate to work with within this new loose canon.