The Transformers: The Movie

On 5 October 1985 Orson Welles spent the day in a studio voicing a planet. "I played the voice of a toy," he told his biographer, Barbara Leaming. He died five days later, and Unicron, that planet, turned out to be his final film role. It's one of the oddities of 'The Transformers: The Movie', the 1986 animated feature that took Hasbro's robots from TV to the big screen, directed by Nelson Shin and animated by Japan's Toei Animation.

It's 2005. Megatron's Decepticons have taken Cybertron, and the Autobots are holding out on its two moons and in Autobot City on Earth, where Optimus Prime sends a shuttle for supplies ahead of a counterattack. The Decepticons find out, and what starts as an ambush ends in a battle outside the city that neither side walks away from unchanged.

Meanwhile something far bigger is on its way. Unicron is a planet-sized robot that eats whole worlds, and the only thing that can destroy him is the Matrix of Leadership, which the Autobots carry. To get it off them he needs someone to do his dirty work. Young Hot Rod, veteran Kup, Ultra Magnus and the other survivors end up scattered across the galaxy, between courts that never acquit anyone and a planet made of junk.

Peter Cullen and Frank Welker are back as Optimus Prime and Megatron, joined by Leonard Nimoy, Judd Nelson, Eric Idle, Lionel Stander, Scatman Crothers and Robert Stack. Vince DiCola wrote the score, though it's Stan Bush's 'The Touch' that people still remember.

It flopped at the time, taking $5.8 million in the US on a $6 million budget, and critics weren't kind (it averages 52.7 out of 100 on the site). It became a cult film over the years, and in September 2026, for its 40th anniversary, it went back into US cinemas with the short 'Optimus Prime: Awakening', Cullen's last performance as Optimus, recorded before he died that August. The re-release took over $5 million worldwide.

• Animation
• Action
• Adventure