Given the recent end to the Writer’s strikes, Roberto Orci has spo­ken out on Don Murphy’s mes­sage board about the sta­tus of the Trans­form­ers movie development:

So we got back to work this week and we find out Bay and pro­duc­tion has been prep­ping the entire movie off of our pre-strike out­line! The very one we turned in the night before the strike.

We had two weeks on the out­line. We’re still going through the prep sched­ule to find out what has been prepped so far down the road that it can be changed and what can’t.

[Michael Bay] essen­tially trans­ferred our out­line into screen­play for­mat and came up with some really fun gags and a few descrip­tions of the kind of hard­ware he will need for production.

As far as I am con­cerned, this is pretty bad news. Looks like the stu­dios and Bay him­self are rush­ing out a lower qual­ity screen­play to meet tar­gets rather than spend some qual­ity time fine tun­ing the piece. Hope­fully Bay’s tom­fool­ery will not be too destruc­tive to the film’s sto­ry­line quality.

Michael Bay — “I’ve been writ­ing Trans­form­ers 2. We’ve got our char­ac­ters all designed. I always write all my scripts, my movies any­way so at least I’ve got some­thing to give the writ­ers. It’s like a tem­plate. We have a really good out­line so I worked on that. […] We had to because I want to make my date. I’m not going to let the strike take me down.”