I'm not talking about Optimus dying, I'm talking about them doing a 180 and bringing him back, at the same time drop-kicking the character they spent an entire movie and season building up as his replacement. If Optimus stayed dead, I think the franchise would look very different today.
No argument there, but again, the decision to kill him was born from out of touch executives and that same group of people pulling a 180 at breakneck speed when the complaints rolled in is par for the course.
I mean kids cared about Optimus, they killed him in front of them, were shocked when this went poorly, and panicked. History as an area of study is kind of hazardous because you don't want to fall into determinist thinking but you also don't want to fall into counter-factual thinking that anything that could happen was just as likely as what did. At a certain point you have to concede to what actually transpired.
All of this is to say that I don't know how anything could have been different once the decision to kill Optimus was made. The 5-10 year olds all acted like you'd expect 5-10 year olds to react in that situation, parents of upset 5-10 year olds reacted exactly as you'd expect, and corporate execs who don't care about art or character development acted like you'd expect them to. Ideally someone should have said "look we invested in a theatrical movie and a full season of television into Rodimus, we need to stay the course," and for all we know someone did say that.
But Hasbro's board looking at the complaints and horror stories of upset kids wasn't going to take the side of the artists in that situation.
As an aside (this isn't part of my argument), I do think it's wild to consider that making an emotional connection with the viewer is one of the greatest things you can hope to achieve with a piece of art and Hasbro not only wound up creating a character people loved, but generated a powerful emotional moment that really transcended the franchise. Artists spend their lives trying to do that and this dumb toy company stumbled ass-backwards into by trying to sell toys.
I have friends who grew up with single mothers and who have said to me that Optimus was a stand in father figure. Say whatever you will about that, that's got some power behind it. And I have to think Cullen was a huge reason for that.
Sunbow had other projects. Hasbro had other projects. Those writers had other projects, but the combination of all of them plus Cullen's delivery just clicked in a way. Like... people like Duke. No one called Duke a father figure.
The funny thing is that through GI Joe and Transformers and MLP and Jem Hasbro found a formula. Give kids characters to get attached to, and they'll want the toys. And then the execs who greenlit that and reaped the benefits of that also said "yeah kill those characters off. Go to town," not realizing that maybe the kids they'd trained to be attached to these characters would be upset watching them get brutally murdered.
In a way, it's a glorious thing. Nothing like that will ever happen again. Everyone's too brand conscious. Hell, they panicked and downgraded Duke's death to "temporary coma" in the GI Joe movie that followed TFTM. It was a one time spark of insanity, and it's probably the reason most of us are still attached to this brand in some way.
And I mean this sincerely, it's probably still the best or second best Transformers movie of all time. I flip flop between it and TFO depending on my mood.
