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.”