Ahead of the trailer drop for the upcoming Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, new character posters reveal a brand-new faction of Transformer that will be joining familiar Autobot faces – the Maximals. The posters show off Maximal newcomers Cheetor (Tongayi Chirisa), Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), Rhinox (David Sobolov) and Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), joining previously released posters of Autobots Bumblebee, Arcee (Liza Koshy), Wheeljack (Cristo Fernández), Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and Mirage (Pete Davidson).

The film will see the Autobots and Maximals team up, brought together by Yeoh‘s Airazor – who the film’s producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura says “in a way, is the bridge between the two groups”, speaking with Total Film magazine. United, the Transformers will face off against the villainous Terrorcons, who director Steven Caple Jr. calls “ruthless”. Caple Jr. explained how “I like to pour a lot into the villains. I like to make them layered and dimensional,” while Di Bonaventura declared Peter Dinklage voiced villain Scourge as “really [having] no purpose in life other than destruction.”

A New Direction for the Franchise

Adapting the fan-favorite story Beast Wars, Rise of the Beasts will be the franchise’s seventh installment, and its first cinematic outing since 2018’s Bumblebee, which saw that film’s director Travis Knight take the series in a new direction, opting to focus on a more personal, character driven story. Speaking with Collider, di Bonaventura explained “there were fans that complained there was not enough action,” but assured audiences that “our hope was when we started out, and our intention, was to bring the intimacy that we were able to create in Bumblebee with the scale that was represented in what’s called the “Bay movies”.”

A fresh, new approach to the series came as no surprise, seeing as 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight, Michael Bay‘s last Transformers effort, saw Paramount lose just shy $100 million – with this no doubt being a large part of the reasoning to make Rise of the Beasts serve as a soft reboot of the franchise

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts releases in theaters on June 9. Check out the new posters, alongside the synopsis of the film, below:

Returning to the action and spectacle that have captured moviegoers around the Returning to the action and spectacle that have captured moviegoers around the world, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts will take audiences on a ‘90s globetrotting adventure with the Autobots and introduce a whole new faction of Transformer – the Maximals – to join them as allies in the existing battle for earth. Directed by Steven Caple Jr. and starring Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback, the film arrives in theatres June 9, 2023.

via Collider