Steve Jablonsky is scoring TRANSFORMERS sequel and GEARS OF WAR 2!

While I was gone for over a week (and I'm working on getting a report, some photos and video of the trip up soon) a number of people wrote in asking if I knew anything about whether or not Steve Jablonsky (left) would be returning to score the sequel to last summer's smash-hit movie Transformers (right now the next chapter is being called Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen but I'm still wondering if Michael Bay might have another title up his sleeve). Anyone who's read this blog over the past year will recall how it became a focal point for the drive to have Jablonsky's amazing music for Transformers released on CD. Happily it was, but it's now no longer being published and unless you pay literally hundreds of dollars for it on eBay the only way you can get it is via iTunes or Amazon's digital download. Hopefully we'll see it released again in time for the sequel.

Anyhoo, I did some checking and it turns out that this past week at E3 it was announced that Steve Jablonsky WILL come back to score the next Transformers movie!

But... that's not all! According to the same report at Music 4 Games, Jablonsky is also composing the soundtrack for Gears of War 2, due out this fall.

This is awesome news! Y'all wouldn't believe how much I listened to the Transformers score on my iPod during the drive out there and back. And I'm a huge fan of Gears of War. The sequel is supposed to be a much deeper and more emotional story. Throw in the heavy-metal mayhem that the first game was known for, and Steve Jablonsky becomes the perfect choice to tap for the soundtrack. Can't wait to play - and listen - to it!

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TRANSFORMERS 2 shaping up fast and my vow regarding TRANSFORMERS: THE SCORE

Tonight I'm still getting plenty of e-mails from folks telling me their tales of woe regarding their not being able to find Transformers: The Score anywhere.

How bad is this? Enough that I'm now feeling some regret at having some copies of the CD here, knowing that most people aren't getting it.

So here's my solemn vow, as an Eagle Scout...

Being that I cannot in good conscience listen to Transformers: The Score and feel right about that after knowing that most people cannot purchase it at all, I promise to no longer listen to Transformers: The Score until I have bought two copies of this CD at a traditional retail outlet. That will be an assurance to me that the CD is finally getting the distribution that it deserves.

Hey, I held off on kissing Lisa until our wedding ceremony. Abstaining from the Transformers score is an easy thing to do after that :-P

Here's hoping and praying that we'll get some official word about the score CD situation soon. In the meantime, there is some good news regarding Transformers 2 or whatever it's title will be:

- Steven Spielberg says that the story for Transformers 2 will be finished within the next two weeks and that if the writer's strike doesn't happen in November then production should begin "pretty quickly".

- Spielberg also says that a full-fledged script may be ready within a month and that Shia Le Beouf is on board for "multiple" sequels.

- Digital pre-visualizations are already well underway! Some of this includes designs that weren't used in the first film... which may be a good sign for those Transformers fans who wanted (but didn't get) to see Arcee: maybe in Part 2 they'll have her at last.

And yeah, I've been following some of the story about the "treatment" that may or may not have been generated somewhere among The Powers That Be (mash down here for an intriguing comment by the admin of Michael Bay's forums). Don't really think we should be reading too much into it right now, 'cuz this early on in a movie's planning stages there's all kinds of ideas and crazy notions that get jotted down, then rejected, sometimes picked up again and almost invariably leading to permutations far different than how they were originally conceived. In the very early drafts of George Lucas's "The Star Wars" there was a guy named Darth Vader but he was a pretty minor character, so anything can still happen.

Oh yeah, only five more days until Transformers is out on DVD, too! :-)

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TRANSFORMERS 2 has a release date!

Superhero Hype! is reporting that Paramount has set a release date for Transformers 2: June 29, 2009.

Which is rather fast for a follow-up to a successful blockbuster movie. No doubt the threat of a writers strike this coming spring had something to do with it. I hope they're not rushing things. But then I think of Spider-Man 2 and how that is widely held to have been better than the original, and how it came out 2 years following Spider-Man. Besides, word is that the producers of Transformers have already sketched-out where this story is going for at least two more movies. And Transformers started filming a year before it was released and it turned out okay: with the foundation already set for much of the pre-production work, they'll probably be able to get to work on this fairly quickly.

By the way, the CD of Steve Jablonksy's score from Transformers comes out two weeks from tomorrow. And a week after that is when Transformers comes out on DVD. Take a wild guess which one I'm looking forward to having more :-)

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