The Greater Philadel­phia Film Office have recently con­firmed, via KYW radio, that Trans­form­ers II will be shoot­ing their in the near future,

That’s just a pos­si­bil­ity still. “Dream of the Romans” has been shoot­ing. ‘Tenure”, “Happy Tears”, and “Marly and Me” are upcom­ing as is Trans­form­ers II. But won’t giant robots wreck the place????

“Ha, ha. Let’s just say the destruc­tion part is going to be dig­i­tally enhanced.”

The Philadel­phia Inquirer have hinted, giv­ing weight to some ear­lier rumors, that the Trans­form­ers sequel will be film­ing in the Beth­le­hem PA area:

Neat twist sur­round­ing the action movie Trans­form­ers 2, whose pro­duc­tion will be based in Philly for the bet­ter part of June. I hear that direc­tor Michael Bay and crew also will shoot in Beth­le­hem, Pa., which will dou­ble as a city in the Far East. (A twist in the notion of send­ing Amer­i­can jobs overseas.)

The IESB have thrown out their Trans­form­ers 2 robot roll call, and with it they state that the Decep­ti­cons shall have the help of the Con­struc­ti­cons in the sec­ond movie.

In the car­toons, their names were Scrap­per, Bonecrusher, Scav­enger, Mix­mas­ter, Hook and Long Haul. And what do we get when they all com­bine and form one huge ass robot? That’s right boys and girls, we are going to see DEVASTATOR on the big screen!

… I’ll re-iterate that. Dev­as­ta­tor is big.

Here’s a pretty awe­some fan mock-up of what Dev­as­ta­tor may look like in the movie, cre­ated by Rise Stu­dios. A cin­e­matic adap­ta­tion of this char­ac­ter shall prob­a­bly appear a lot more com­plex than this, to fit in with the style already set out by the first movie.

As for the human side of the argu­ment, IESB have posted up a prospec­tive char­ac­ter list which is now wait­ing to be cast:

[CHUCK] 19–25 yrs., Sam’s room­mate at Prince­ton. He runs a con­spir­acy the­ory web­site. Funny in an irrev­er­ent, edgy way, he is shocked to see his con­spir­acy the­o­ries come to life. (2nd Lead)

[U.S. MILITARY LEADER] Late 20s/early 30s, African Amer­i­can with a great sense of humor and a tough mil­i­tary pres­ence. (Sup­port­ing lead)

[UK SPECIAL FORCES LEADER] British, in his early to mid 30s, smart and capa­ble. Can be Cau­casian, Black, East Indian. (Sup­port­ing lead)

[GALLOWAY] Early 40s-early 50s, male, National Secu­rity Advi­sor and pres­i­den­tial liai­son. A curt man who is tightly wound. (Sup­port­ing Lead)

[PROFESSOR COLAN] 40s, Sam’s physics pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton. He’s a self-satisfied intel­lec­tual who com­pares him­self to Ein­stein, and is arro­gant enough to wear leather pants to look cool. (1 Scene)

[THERESA] Early 30s; she’s Sgt. Epps’ wife, has 4 kids, sassy and sexy, good with com­edy. Sub­mit African Amer­i­can actresses only

[MOMMA SIMMONS] This NY Momma is in her late 60s / early 70s. She runs a deli/ butcher shop with her son in Brook­lyn. Tough and sar­cas­tic. (1 Scene)

[MASSIVE DYNAMICS CEO] 50s, male, this Cor­po­rate CEO appears in front of con­gress to tes­tify. (1 speech/scene)

[TEXAS CONGRESSMAN] 55–65 yrs., on a Con­gres­sional Com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the pur­pose of the “Auto­mated Defen­sive Ini­tia­tive” devel­oped by Mas­sive Dynamics.

[FBI DIRECTOR] Mid 50s, male, giv­ing a press release assur­ing the pub­lic they will be safe against attacks. (1 speech/scene)

[CNN REPORTER] Report­ing on mis­sile strikes and bomb­ings in var­i­ous cities. Sub­mit male / female, all eth­nic­i­ties (1 speech)

Another of our vehic­u­lar friends has turned up on the streets, this time it is the ever recog­nis­able Opti­mus Prime. These were taken on the 405 Free­way in Los Ange­les. The bots are on the move — per­haps they are being col­lected together for the begin­ning of a Trans­form­ers 2 shoot?

Pic­tures thanks to SHH:

Film School Rejects have posted some high­way pic­tures of Bar­ri­cade being trans­ported through Cul­ver City. They are Saleen Mus­tangs with the Decep­ti­con logo on the side pan­els. Note that mul­ti­ple cars are used for film­ing. Rumors sug­gest that Trans­form­ers 2 film­ing may be in prepa­ra­tion, though I’d hes­i­tate — we’ll prob­a­bly have to wait a lit­tle longer.

Shia has been hap­pily dis­cussing the new Trans­form­ers movie adap­ta­tion with British pub­li­ca­tion Empire, although keep­ing the secrets to him­self it seems:

“It’s going to be bad-ass. We’re not mak­ing another one unless it is, and Mike is def­i­nitely not rest­ing on his lau­rels — he’s doing insane shit again. And the pre-vizes that I’ve seen… it’s just mas­sive. If the first one was any indi­ca­tor of how mas­sive mas­sive can be, this is going to blow that out of the water. It’s insane. Mike’s mind was just kind of made for this — it’s amaz­ing. There’s going to be a lot more char­ac­ter­i­za­tion with the robots, which I’m excited about. […] There’s gonna be new robots on both sides. I can say that the war isn’t over… It’s hard to do inter­views when you’re not allowed to talk about the movies. It’s like I give two or three things away and then I get rep­ri­manded for it. It’s never fun to get rep­ri­manded by these people”.

Given the recent end to the Writer’s strikes, Roberto Orci has spo­ken out on Don Murphy’s mes­sage board about the sta­tus of the Trans­form­ers movie development:

So we got back to work this week and we find out Bay and pro­duc­tion has been prep­ping the entire movie off of our pre-strike out­line! The very one we turned in the night before the strike.

We had two weeks on the out­line. We’re still going through the prep sched­ule to find out what has been prepped so far down the road that it can be changed and what can’t.

[Michael Bay] essen­tially trans­ferred our out­line into screen­play for­mat and came up with some really fun gags and a few descrip­tions of the kind of hard­ware he will need for production.

As far as I am con­cerned, this is pretty bad news. Looks like the stu­dios and Bay him­self are rush­ing out a lower qual­ity screen­play to meet tar­gets rather than spend some qual­ity time fine tun­ing the piece. Hope­fully Bay’s tom­fool­ery will not be too destruc­tive to the film’s sto­ry­line quality.

Michael Bay — “I’ve been writ­ing Trans­form­ers 2. We’ve got our char­ac­ters all designed. I always write all my scripts, my movies any­way so at least I’ve got some­thing to give the writ­ers. It’s like a tem­plate. We have a really good out­line so I worked on that. […] We had to because I want to make my date. I’m not going to let the strike take me down.”

Trans­form­ers 2 pro­ducer Lorenzo di Bonaven­tura has been speak­ing with the IESB, mainly about GI Joe, but there were some Trans­form­ers 2 tid­bits in there also:

IESB: Can you give us a quick update on Trans­form­ers 2. Is it still planned for shoot­ing in July of 08?

LDB: The sec­ond, June 2nd.

IESB: Is the story locked?

LDB: We’re nowhere because of the strike, we won’t know until we come back. We have a very fine out­line and we know exactly where we want go with the movie but until this writ­ers strike comes back, we’ll find out exactly where we are. Michael is com­pletely on top of every detail. He’s designed a lot of great stuff already. He’s got a lot of great sequences imag­ined but you know, he needs some writ­ers to work with before he’s ready to go, so I would say June 2nd is an unof­fi­cial start, it’s the tar­get date we’d like to go for but, you know, we’ve got to get some writ­ers to help us.

Hol­ly­wood Reporter have an uncon­firmed arti­cle stat­ing that the release date for Trans­form­ers 2 has slipped from June 26th 2009 to a now “unslot­ted date”, pos­si­bly being pushed back to a 2010 release. This is all spec­u­la­tion at this point, as I can­not find a reli­able source to con­firm this. Though any delays can in all like­li­hoods be linked to the WGA strikes.

We’ll keep you posted.