The third and final chapter of the officially licensed Netflix original series promoting the current toyline premiered on the platform today. Kingdom comes to Netflix during an exciting time for the franchise which is seeing growth in the media segment after many lull years. While Michael Bay’s live-action movie series about the shape shifting robots is divisive, its financial success couldn’t be called into question until the fifth movie, The Last Knight, floundered even in Asian markets.
Paramount is still waffling about whether Bumblebee was a reboot or an extremely retcon-heavy prequel, but the next live action flick is coming in 2022, alongside a prime-time cartoon on Nickelodeon and family-friendly comedy series about the diminutive BotBots. War For Cybertron on Netflix was already an indication of growth, as it was significantly more involved - and developed on a higher budget - than the Prime Wars Trilogy which Hasbro produced with Machinima. Old timers in the fandom also have the 1986 animated movie’s return to theatres for its 35th anniversary to look forward to - and while Kingdom incorporates plot elements and characters from Beast Wars into the story, it’s still mostly G1 inspired. Continuing the story started in Siege and escalated in Earthrise, Kingdom follows the Autobots and the Decepticons to what looks like prehistoric Earth, but looks can be deceiving. The opposing forces are both hunting for the Allspark to restore life to Cybertron, but other forces stir in the background - the animalistic Maximals and Predacons are locked in their own struggle, while the mythical Unicron is set to have an appearance as well, alongside the comic inspired robot mode of the Ark spaceship. Transformers: War For Cybertron - Kingdom is streaming now on Netflix.
