We’re really excited for the Bumblebee movie. No, really, we are! Yes we’ve seen the five other Transformers movies and, us, 4.5 of them aren’t great but we sincerely believe in the concept and we think the idea of solo movies is finally going to start bringing that to the fore. Plus the cast and crew are amazing, with Christina Hodson writing, Travis King and Hailee Steinfeld front and centre as lead, Charlie Watson. Better still, the whole thing is set in the 1980s which as anyone who’s seen Short Circuit and the original Transformers movie can attest, is the golden age of big robot movies.

Now, we’ve got photos of new cast member John Cena on set. WWE superstar Cena has been consistently impressive on the big screen and we’re really excited to see him in what may be his biggest role to date. Word is that he plays a Sector 7 Agent called Burns and that, at this time, the autobots are known to Sector 7 and the two groups work together. That’s certainly a very big harpoon/machine gun combo he’s sitting next to. Which, just to REALLY nerd out for a second, is probably the basis of the swarming, hand-to-hand protocols human soldiers are seen using to take down Decepticons in Dark of the Moon.

It’s going to be really interesting to see how that relationship is explored, evolves and presumably breaks given how things are with Sector 7 by the time of the original movie. Regardless, we’re really looking forward to seeing what a Transformers movie with a smaller scale, and better focus, will look like.

Bumblebee is out 21 December 2018. Thanks to Allspark for the story and there are more pictures (Including the coolest steering wheel hub EVER) over there too.