Michael Bay keeps vfx shops busy - Entertainment News, ShoWest: Vanguard Award -- Michael Bay, Media - Variety Nice little article here, where he says there are going to be 60 robots instead of the 40 count we heard of before.
I'm sure from the guy's perspective it's noteworthy as it takes quite a lot of effort to animate the little bastards, but yeah, it doesn't really add so much. I did a quick recount and got 24 character bots, not including Devastator. Unless upwards of 15 toys haven't been produced, it's really not realistic to think that 60 is a meaningful number. Pumping all that money into kitchenbots seems like a waste of money, really.
You guys are forgetting they already have models made up for 10+ robots! Also they had to figure that stuff out from scratch in the last movie. This time they know what they're doing, how they're going to do it, and on top of that a MUCH bigger budget to work with. The 20+ frenzy bots could perhaps be counted as one considering you could just copy the model.
That could be a count of every robot in the film even if some of them were not character quality robots. Sort of like where we see Sam and the robotic insect, if it's just a robotic insect and not an Insecticon then yes it would count as being a robot but we might not count it as a character type part or maybe even a proper Transformer. Likely lots of parts like Dew Bot that weren't really characters until the fandom decided to sort of adopt him and turn him into a character even if the comic book told that horrible lie about Dew Bot being dead instead of snow boarding down a mountain shooting skiers with his cans.
I think that if there are that many robots, I'd rather most of them have little/no character. So each robot doesn't have a backstory, but having so many random unknowns running around would make the setting that much more real. Every character that appears in a movie doesn't have a name (unless, of course, that movie is Star Wars, but that's neither here nor there), and even in real life, nobody knows everybody in a large crowd. After all, we didn't expect to have a name for each of the 300 Spartans, did we?
Yeah, I doubt everyone of the bots will have backing stories nor will I want them all to have them, however they still will be able to have character without a backing story. Personality is whats going to make them come to life, and we heard various times that they really worked hard on adding personalities to all of the robots.