Everyone's favorite yellow-and-black Autobot gets his own movie in the teaser trailer for the Transformers spinoff, Bumblebee. Following the release of 2014's Transformers: Age of Extinction, Paramount decided to try and turn the live-action Transformers film series into a full blown cinematic universe. Last year's Transformers: The Last Knight was meant to serve as the first link that chain, but Paramount has since put those plans on indefinite (and possibly permanent) hold, in the wake of that film's under-performance at the global box office.

Whatever the future holds for the Transformers movies, Bumblebee has already finished production and will make its way to the big screen this December. The movie takes place in a small California town circa 1987 and stars Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, a soon-to-be 18 year old mechanic who stumbles upon what seems to be a broken-down VW bug in a junkyard. Of course, as Charlie is quick to discover after she tries to repair the car, there's much more to this rundown vehicle than meets the eye.

In addition to being the first live-action Transformers film directed by someone other than Michael Bay (namely, Kubo and the Two Strings' Travis Knight), Bumblebee was written by up and comer Christina Hodson, the first woman to pen a Transformers movie. The film's box office performance will no doubt impact Paramount's plans for the Transformers movies in the future, which may be why the studio is getting Bumblebee's marketing going well ahead of its end-of-year release. As such, the Bumblebee teaser trailer is now online and can be viewed in the space above. You can also check out the teaser poster, below.

The Bumblebee trailer is unsurprisingly light on plot details (being a teaser and all), but firmly establishes that this film will look and feel quite different from Bay's Transformers films. Bumblebee has been likened to The Iron Giant by its producers and that comes through in the movie's trailer, which has a quiet sense of wonderment and hints at a heartfelt relationship forming between "B" and his newfound human companion Charlie. And of course, given the film's '80s setting, the trailer manages to sneak in at least one joke about the pop culture of the decade (namely, Rick Astley's now infamous "Never Gonna Give You Up").

Steinfeld's human costar John Cena also makes a brief appearance in the Bumblebee teaser, along with one of the other robots in disguise that will be showing up in the film. It's been reported that Optimus Prime will also make an appearance at some point, but that otherwise Bumblebee will be very much a one Autobot show and proper solo adventure for its namesake. After Bay's run on the franchise became increasingly bombastic with each passing film, a (relatively) smaller and more emotional Transformers movie - along the lines of what the Bumblebee teaser promises - sounds all the more refreshing for it.

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Source: Paramount Pictures

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