Transformers One is a 2024 animated prequel to the entire Transformers franchise, directed by Josh Cooley and set on Cybertron long before Optimus Prime and Megatron became the greatest enemies in the known universe. The film answers the question embedded in every Transformers story: how did two beings who were once best friends and allies become the opposing leaders of the Autobots and Decepticons? What it discovers is a story about ambition, ideology, systemic oppression, and the particular tragedy of two people who share a dream but find themselves on opposite sides of the methods required to achieve it.

Chris Hemsworth voices Orion Pax, the future Optimus Prime — optimistic, loyal, and idealistic, a maintenance worker in a caste society who discovers that the Cybertron he loves is built on a lie. Brian Tyree Henry voices D-16, the future Megatron — brilliant, proud, and increasingly uncompromising, whose understanding of that same lie leads him toward a different and more violent conclusion. Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Jon Hamm, and Steve Buscemi round out the cast in a film that plays as both a franchise origin story and a surprisingly moving meditation on how friendships fracture under political and ideological pressure.

Transformers One arrived as the most critically acclaimed entry in the franchise in over a decade, with reviewers praising the film's emotional ambition, its gorgeous Cybertron production design, and the voice performances at its center — particularly Henry's D-16, who emerges as the film's most complex and sympathetic figure. It performed modestly at the box office relative to the live-action blockbusters that preceded it, but generated enormous goodwill from both longtime fans and newcomers who found in it something the franchise had rarely offered: a genuinely moving story about the costs of losing a friend to ideology. Available on Paramount+.