Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Deadline is reporting something pretty sad to me: Laika founder and Kubo and the Two Strings director Travis Knight has been brought on to direct his first live action feature film. That's not the bad news. Yay for him, he's a great filmmaker and I can't wait to see how he applies that vision in a live action feature. The bad news is he's getting sucked up into Transformers spin-offs.
He'll be directing the Bumblebee movie, the first spin-off to come out of that big writers room collaboration. The script comes from Christina Hodson, the writer of the Naomi Watts thriller Shut In.
So... yeah. I'm sure someone as good at character and visual storytelling as Knight is will easily make the best Transformers movie we've seen up to know but I'm just so wholly uninvested in this franchise at this point that it bums me out his creative eye is being pulled away from Laika, who has consistently knocked it out of the park.
As a business move it's hard to fault the man. He'll likely make a bunch of money doing this and can all but guarantee his first live action film is a huge moneymaker, which then gives him more freedom on his next thing, but the price for that is seeing his particular vision pulled out of circulation for the next two or three years.
What do you folks think? Am I overreacting? Underreacting? Reacting just the perfect amount?
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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