Dear God; please say it ain’t so. After the first three movies; we had all hoped that the Transformers franchise was going to be going away. Michael Bay and Shia TheBeef have both said they won’t be returning to it, so there had been some optimism in the air.

Jason Statham

Naturally, however, we can’t have a good thing for very long, and now the studios are looking for new talent to lead us into a fourth movie. A new director is being actively hunted, and now we begin to hear rumors about who may be taking the male lead in a movie that should be all about robots. It’s Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s boyfriend, Jason Statham.

According to a Hollywood insider, it seems the plan is to bring the Transformers towards “a new, darker direction. Jason could be just the man to do that and his relationship with Rosie would be an added bonus in marketing the movie”, as if a which-celebrity-has-sex-with-other-celebrity is a big thing on the minds of Transformers fans across the globe when deciding which movie to go see.

I’m sure this is just a wild rumor – and a pretty horrible idea – but at the same time, this might actually still be pretty damn cool. The best thing would be to reboot the franchise completely; go Nolan-Batman on it and give us new stories in a darker, grittier and – presumably – far less explosive world. I’m actually kind of curious what that would be like, even though I’m not going to be holding my breath for this any time soon. Jason Statham should do what he does best – movies where he beats the crap out of people in style. Let the Transformers be; it needs to rest after being manhandled by Michael Bay.