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SDCC 2018: Full Bumblebee Panel Video, Footage Description and Highlights

by · July 21, 2018

The SDCC panel for the Bumblebee movie happened yesterday in the fully packed Hall H. The panel was moderated by Entertainment Weekly’s Anthony Breznican and featured appearances by director Travis Knight and the three leads Hailee Steinfeld, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., and John Cena. Read on for all the new details that were revealed, including a video of the full panel and description of the footage that was shown.

 

The panel started with Stan Bush performing onstage the iconic for all Transformers fans song ‘The touch’, followed by some introductions by Anthony Breznican.

 

 

 

Then a featurette on director Travis Knight was shown. After that the director himself took the stage, talking about the creation of Bee’s new look and how they approached the animation of the Autobot. This is where Knight revealed that the planet Cybertron will be featured in the movie.

 

Then Hailee Steinfeld, and shortly after that Jorge Lendeborg Jr. took the stage discussing their characters.

 

 

While discussing the movie’s villains, Travis Knight made the cool revelation that the two Decepticon villains (recently revealed by EW), Shatter (voiced by Angela Bassett) and Dropkick (voiced by Justin Theroux) are actually triple changers, explaining why we see Decepticons as cars and not the usual military or flying machines. In the movie, apart from their form of muscle cars, Shatter’s third mode will be a jet, while Dropkick will be turning into a chopper.

 

Also the director revealed that the jet that we’ve seen in the trailer is not Starscream as many suggested, but the Decepticon Blitzwing.

 

This is when John Cena made an impressive entrance on the stage, making the panel quite fun. In the film Cena plays agent Burns who is the human villain but it was mentioned several times that he has his reasons to be what he is, and that actually his intentions are in the gray area.

 

 

After that a new footage from the movie was shown. Our friends from TFW2005 have a brief description of it:

 

  • Footage of forest scene vs military.
  • Blitzwing and BB fighting on mountain.
  • Bee lost and suffered memory core failure.
  • Scanned VW beetle before fainting.
  • Garage scene.
  • Showing extended scene. Charlie and BB talking for the first time.
  • She “named” BB. “You look like a Bumblebee, so I’m going to call you that.”
  • Shatter and Dropkick offer to help military find Bee because he’s a “criminal”.
  • Fight scene between Shatter, Dropkick, and Bee.
  • Optimus Prime appears in hologram form, looking close to G1 design.

 

Then it was time for some Q&A. The best part was when the voice of Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen himself appeared in the audience and asked the director a question why he was almost fully absent from the shown footage. You can check the director’s reply and the full panel in the video below.

 

 

 

 

You can be certain that if Bumblebee is successful, then the next movie in the stand-alone Transformers series will surely be about Optimus Prime. At least we can only hope.

 

Last but not least, Anthony Breznican shared this great backstage photo after the panel reuniting Peter Cullen with singer Stan Bush!

 

 

 

Bumblebee hits theaters on December 21.

 

 

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