By: Katey Rich

Michael Bay is finally stepping way from the Transformers franchise next year by making, of all things, a dark comedy, teaming up with the dynamic meathead duo of Dwayne Johnson and Mark Wahlberg for Pain and Gain, due next year. It seems like a promising direction for a guy who started his career with the wry Bad Boys, but it won’t be long before Bay is back on the robot beat with the planned Transformers 4– and to make the transition easier, he might be taking one of his Pain and Gain stars with him.

According to Twitch Film, Bay and Wahlberg are “having early conversations” about Wahlberg top lining Transformers 4, currently set for a June 27, 2014 release. That directly contradicts another rumor we were hearing, about the star of the new Transformers franchise being a high school girl. But of course, we’re talking about rumors and early conversations here– odds are very little is set in stone, and given that Bay had no problem shooting the second Transformers movie without a functional script, he’ll probably have no problem making more changes up until the absolute last minute.

Wahlberg, for all his muscle-bound intensity and relative fame, has actually never starred in a franchise (unless you count Tim Burton‘s Planet of the Apes, which I don’t). It would be a little weird for Wahlberg to jump into another franchise now, even if it’s a role as small as the one Josh Duhamel played in the first three films, popping up from time to time and with plenty of room to go do other things. But then, maybe Wahlberg and Bay are having such a good time on Pain and Gain that they want to work together on whatever’s next– and spending months running away from CGI robots is worth a little more hang time.

Source: Cinema Blend