In an interview with Hero Complex to promote Transformers: The Ride, Michael Bay discussed some of the preliminary plans he is considering for Transformers 4 now that principle photography of Pain and Gain is complete. Bay said there will be a new cast, the story will not be a reboot but a "new direction", wants to avoid going to sci-fi but might take events to space and needs to sculpt a script that will reduce the budget by $30 million (so close to first movie's $150 budget).It is unclear if by new cast he means just humans or also the Transformer characters (and thus the voice actors). The "new direction" means the "history" of the previous films will remain intact and possibly inform on events in the fourth movie. As I have said before, there is little reason there could not have been more than one NEST team defeating Decepticon threats not lead by Megatron. The budget cut seem significant but I wouldn't be surprised if half of that is recouped by hiring the new cheaper cast. The other half can be saved with careful use of special effects. Considering how Bay's on location shoots tend to be large in scale, the cost of space green screen sequences vs. on location shooting is about a wash in budget savings so that will be dictated more by story needs. Bay and writer Ehren Krueger still have at least six or so months to hammer out the first draft needed to get pre-production going so any or all these ideas could change. Below are the relevant segments, the full article can be found here.
