Lorenzo di Bonaventura has produced several films in both franchises.
**Warning: This article contains spoilers for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts**
Long-term Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura has confirmed that the next film in the action franchise will include GI Joe characters – following a tease at the end of the newly released film Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.
At the end of the new movie, the main character Noah (Anthony Ramos) speaks to an agent played by House of Cards star Michael Kelly, who ends their exchange by handing over a business card bearing the name of legend GI Joe.
And di Bonaventura has revealed that while he doesn’t like the term “crossover”, the plan is that the eighth Transformers film will indeed include some characters from the other Hasbro franchise.
“It’s at an idea stage, but I think where my thinking is – and we’ve talked a bit about it – is we’re going to continue as a sequel,” he explained during an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com.
“It’s not–crossover I find a very confusing word, because everybody has a slightly different interpretation of what that means. So what I’ll say is, this is a film that is going to continue this story with the Maximals, with the Autobots, and now it’s going to bring in some GI Joe characters.”
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Speaking more generally about the future of the franchise, and whether there might be plans to set films in any other time periods now that the series has featured movies in both the ’80s and ’90s, di Bonaventura explained: “I don’t know that we definitively know the answer.”
He added: “Our instincts are that we’re going to keep moving towards 2007. So what does that mean? We don’t know yet. There’s a reason we picked ’94 – partly because it was that seminal year in hip-hop. We were going to do the 90s, we were going to do something. So I think we’ll still be in the ’90s, but we’ll see.”
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is now showing in UK cinemas. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what’s on.
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