Yesterday, we brought you news of Paramount’s plan to release three new Transformers movies over three consecutive years. Shooting all of those back to back seemed like an impossible task, but things are now starting to make a little more sense as it turns out that the 2018 movie won’t be Transformers 6 after all. Instead, it’s going to be a spinoff movie!

Talking during an investor conference call yesterday, Hasbro’s Tom Warner (who deals with the Transformers toys) confirmed that fan-favourite Bumblebee is getting his own movie.

“This summer we worked closely with a talented team of A-list screenwriters to map out the future of the Transformers cinematic universe, and as Brian announced earlier, things kick off in a major way in 2017 with the release of Transformers 5 in June. And we’re working on a spin-off movie centred around Bumblebee for 2018 and the next chapter for 2019.”

Whether or not Warner was supposed to reveal that information is tough to say, but as we know that the fifth movie is coming in 2017, it’s now hard not to wonder whether that 2019 release is also a spinoff (if Bumblebee is getting one, surely Optimus Prime could as well?).

This Bumblebee movie is likely the result of the writers room the studio put together.

Regardless, we’ll likely hear more on this soon, especially as production on the fifth instalment is set to start a little later this year with Michael Bay once again at the helm.