Corey Burton Shoots Down Casting Rumor

In a Q&A session on his forums, Corey Burton shot down suggestions he would reprise his role as the voice of Shockwave for the voice of Shockwave for Transformers: Dark of the Moon while offering up an alternative. Burton was the voice of Shockwave (also Spike and more) in the original Generation One Transformers cartoons and movie. His extensive career includes voice work in many loved cartoon series over the years.

...with regards to the live action Michael Bay movies, were you ever contacted about reprising? I can't imagine anyone else being shockwave except you; sadly he doesn't appear (and they even got frank welker back but not as megatron and they forgot to make his soundwave voice awesome).
I was given the opportunity to audition for Jazz (a totally incomprehensible request for me to even attempt), and "Brawl" (you might recall I was Brawn in the early series), but it was just a one line "cameo" bit that didn't seem worth jumping through all the audition hoops, just for a 2-second bit of scale rate "incidental" VO work.

It is rumored that David Warner himself has been under consideration for the next live-action/CGI movie production, as Shockwave - which I feel is entirely appropriate, given Mr. Bay's propensity for casting Screen Personalities over multi-voiced off-camera "cartoon" character voice actors - and Mr. Warner's outstanding history of consistently vivid and "savory" character performances (a much under-appreciated and impressively versatile master craftsman in the fine art of Acting, across the entire spectrum of audio/visual performance media). I wish them nothing but the very best for the wildly successful franchise; and have practically no interest in that kind of mega-budget movie enterprise involvement. I'm much too busy as it is, and thoroughly rewarded already many times over for the work I've done under the Transformers brand.

He is probably correct as he would have likely heard from Michael Bay by now if he was in contention for a voice over role in the film. I do love the idea of David Warner working in the film as he is an amazing character actor with a fantastic voice. For me he will forever be the definitive voice of Ra's Al Ghul from Batman: The Animated Series. He also has performed multiple characters for the Star Trek movies and TV series (such as Gorkon in Undiscovered Country), was Master Control Program in Tron, among many other roles.

Before someone points it out, IMDB.com does list Burton as the voice of Shockwave in the movie but the website is a horrible source of information for movies in production. Once the film is out and the info updates to reflect official studio data it is usual source. If a project is listed in some variation of "in production", then take the info with a grain of salt. For now there is almost no information on who has been cast as the voices of the various new characters in Transformers 3. If history is any guide, we probably will not know most of them until after them movie is released. Thanks to Christopher R. for the link.