After the com­mo­tion and issues that Michael Bay under­went dur­ing pro­duc­tion and film­ing for the first Trans­form­ers film, Bay has decided that the best way to fight these unavoid­able leaks is to cre­ate “fake ones”, to put peo­ple off the scent and prob­a­bly reveal the source of the leaks:

“One thing I do know is I know how to screw them up more. […] We’re going to leak a lot of false infor­ma­tion all over the place. I now know their game. They’re going to get a lot of script treat­ments that they think are going to be the script. They will never see the script. We’ve got scripts and treat­ments writ­ten up that we’re going to leak. No one’s going to know.” — Rot­ten Tomatoes

Vari­ety are run­ning an update on exactly how the cur­rent Writer’s Guild strikes shall affect the big bud­get Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions, specif­i­cally Michael Bay’s Trans­form­ers 2 and the Wolver­ine X-men spin off:

DreamWorks/Par’s “Trans­form­ers 2″ is far enough along to pro­ceed with pre-production, loca­tion scout­ing and advance VFX work, but will face seri­ous issues if the strike con­tin­ues for sev­eral months. Michael Bay’s megabud­get sequel isn’t set to start film­ing until June.

[…]

Fox is mov­ing full speed ahead with its “X-Men” spin­off “Wolver­ine,” even though many roles are still uncast. Unlike “X-Men,” “Wolver­ine” rests solidly on Hugh Jackman’s shoulders.

If you don’t under­stand the cause of these strikes, I rec­om­mend watch­ing this video which explains every­thing you need to know:

Com­ing­Soon tell us that Nigel Phelps has been enrolled in the next stage of the live action Trans­form­ers saga. He has pre­vi­ously worked with Michael Bay on both Pearl Har­bor and The Island. This news comes via the Uni­fied Tal­ent Agency web­site, which attaches Phelps to the project.

The dead­line has passed and the chips are in, and it looks like the next Trans­form­ers movie missed the boat on this one. Vari­ety are report­ing that amongst a num­ber of other major sequels being planned, Trans­form­ers did not com­plete the writ­ing phase in time for the planned indus­trial action.

It seems that suc­cess­ful labor talks will now be nec­es­sary to kick-start the process and allow the sequel to hit the­aters on the pro­jected release date. We’ll cross out fin­gers on this one.

The LATimes report that the stu­dios have hired Ehren Kruger (The Ring, Arling­ton Road) to write the screen­play with orig­i­nal Trans­former writ­ers Alex Kurtz­man and Roberto Orci. The deal is expected to be in the region of $8m.

The arti­cle then dis­cusses the com­plex­i­ties of involv­ing these three busy par­ties in a sin­gle, man­age­able writ­ing schedule.

Megan Fox has told MTV that she has signed on for Trans­form­ers 2, although the exact quote is along the lines of “I hear they are writ­ing it now… so we’ll see”, which I per­son­ally do not take as much of a con­fir­ma­tion. Of course we are in very early stages and all pos­i­tive hints that the orig­i­nal stars will return for the sequel are a good sign.

In an inter­view with About​.com, Shia La Beouf men­tioned (in pass­ing) that he would like to have an involve­ment in a trans­form­ers sequel. Noth­ing con­crete and no con­fir­ma­tion that he has signed on but it’s a pos­tive angle at least.

Shia LaBeouf: “I was think­ing about quit­ting this indus­try. And Michael Bay will tell you that. He’s so hard on his actors, […]

Why didn’t you walk off the set?

Shia LaBeouf: “Because it was too impor­tant to my career.”

You’ll never do that again.

Shia LaBeouf: “I mean, until 2 and 3.”

Vari­ety are report­ing that Para­mount Pic­tures and Dream­works  are plan­ning to release the Trans­form­ers sequel on June 26th 2009, though this may of course be sub­ject to change — espe­cially with the writer’s strike dilemma.

The arti­cle also spec­u­lates that Michael Bay will return to direct — he is in the final stages of nego­ti­a­tion. There are also high expec­ta­tions con­cern­ing Spielberg’s involve­ment with the sequel, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing his close work with the project and his ongo­ing work­ing rela­tion­ship with Shia LaBeouf (see Indi­ana Jones 4).