One time head of Warner Bros and current producer Lorenzo DiBonaventura was at the press junket for Four Brothers this morning, and he talked a little bit about his upcoming Transformers project. The film has gone through a couple of drafts, including one by CHUD.com friend John Rogers (who I had the honor of finally meeting, all too briefly, at this year’s Comic Con), and there had been many reports about just what the focus of the film would be. Some drafts, I had heard, focused mainly on the robots, while others was more of big robot version of ET, with a lot of emphasis on the kid who finds and befriends the Transformers.
So which is it? "It’s both. It’s hard. Transformers is really tricky because we took a picture of one of the Transformers as constructed in the show and we put it out in the field and it looked really goofy. And I’m saying this as a fan. When you put it into reality, it demands a different thing, and that’s what the struggle is – to try to make it more real and more relatable to a broader audience than the original series was. We’re going to go through some fits and starts where we figure out how much of the robots can we handle and how much of the kid can we handle. It’s really sort of finding the balance of the two things."
So the film is still in its infancy – they don’t even have any robot designs, let alone a solid script. When asked whether the 2007 release date that was announced at Comic Con – July 4 – was going to be a real date, DiBonaventura said, "Ask Dreamworks!"
Meanwhile, Lorenzo reports that it looks like there won’t be a sequel to Constantine after all. "I wish there was. I don’t think the economics of it will – it was a profitable movie but I don’t know if [Warners] thought it was profitable enough to get to a sequel. I really liked that character. He’s a curmudgeon of the first order. And that’s the trick right now, to try and make movies that – if you go back and look at Steve McQueen movies, he was a jerk in pretty much everything he was in, but you just get along for the ride. "