Dawson Casting: Tessa, who is 17 during the film's events, was born when Cade was a teenager, meaning Cade is at most in his mid-thirties. Mark Wahlberg was 42 during filming.
Shane McCarthy who created the character of Drift in his first iteration in the comics (The Transformers: All Hail Megatron), dislikes the movie incarnation featured here, accusing him of being a racist stereotype. Fans were quick to point out that McCarthy has also used words to imply he's not fond of Drift's development in later comics like The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye (which he wasn't involved with) that most feel made him a significantly better character, and that Drift's entire original persona was little other than highly stereotypical itself.
Derrick J. Wyatt, the art director of Transformers: Animated, was not pleased with the film's take on his character Lockdown, deeming it a name slap and an insult to the character he helped create.
Lying Creator: Bay said that the film was going to be the shortest of the series, with reports of a 120-minute running time floating about. Turns out those reports are false and the running time that has been revealed is 165 minutes, making it the longest of the series so far.
Milestone Celebration: This was released on the franchise's thirtieth anniversary. Even more so to capitalize it as the sole billion grossing movie of 2014.
No Export for You: The tie-in toy line. With most of the "regular" toys being sold under the Generations series, which only gets a wide release in a select few countries, this is the first movie-based TF toy line that (aside from the simplified, gimmicky figures aimed at small kids) doesn't even see a first-wave release in a lot of places of the world.
In a reversal of the animated movie, Frank Welker is this as Galvatron to Hugo Weaving as Megatron.note Welker did voice Galvatron in the G1 cartoon's third season after voicing Megatron in the first two.
In the Mexican dub, Alfonso Ramírez and Mario Arvizu replace Blas García and Gerardo Vásquez as Optimus and Megatron, respectively.
Playing Against Type: Mark Ryan voices Lockdown, one of the main antagonists. In the previous films, he voiced Bumblebee and Jetfire, both of whom, were heroes.
Concept art shows multiple versions of Slash, the Dinobot velociraptor, joining in the final fight.
Clint Eastwood was originally considered for voicing Lockdown before Mark Ryan was chosen. There is artwork of him as an apocalyptic muscle car like in Animated, but Lamborghini wanted in.
Adding onto this, Lockdown was at one point strongly pushed to closely adhere to his original incarnation in terms of design and even having Lance Henriksen reprise his role (when contacted about potentially joining the production, Henriksen was also reportedly eager to return as the character).
Drift's color scheme was originally intended to be orange and black. It ended up being used by the Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015) version of the character.
Stringer was going to be a fembot named Widow Maker
Optimus was supposed to have an armor-up scene where he added new weapons to his robot mode. This would have explained why he suddenly gained flight at the end of the movie. His arms do change slightly as he takes the sword inside Lockdown's ship, but the change is so slight that it generally goes unnoticed.
Crosshairs had the working names of Smokescreen and Slingshot.
on Game Grumps in May 2023, nearly nine years after the movie's release.