Great success for the virtual acting community: The upcoming Transformers movie, the fourth in the franchise, will most likely not feature any of the principals from the first three — and, therefore, quite possibly, will feature no humans at all. Explains now-former castmember Josh Duhamel to E!: “I don’t think anybody’s doing it. I know Shia [LaBeouf]’s not doing it. I don’t think Tyrese [Gibson] or Rosie [Huntington-Whiteley] or anybody else is doing it.” That’s right! Even the services of the Victoria’s Secret model transformed (ahem) into an actress just so that she could run away from robots are not necessary! Michael Bay’s incomprehensible directing style has long displayed a disdain for the intricacies and subtleties of interpersonal relationships (except in Bad Boys II, of course), so the fact that he’s doing away with all carbon-based life forms might suggest he’s finally given in to his base impulses: all action, all the time. That means Transformers 4 may well be going full-bore into 100 percent nonstop mind-numbing exploding-robot movie magic. Like: no romantic subplots; no familial concerns; no hilariously failed attempt at relatable human emotions of any kind. Just. Fucking. Robots. Fucking. Shit. Up. Can this be, Josh? Is there any other reasonable alternative explanation you can offer? “Whenever these movies make that much money they’re going to make as many as they can. [But] I haven’t heard anything about it. They haven’t called me.” Very astute. Very helpful. You can go now, Duhamel.

So! Does anyone know what is really going on here? Earlier this week, producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura offered more insight, saying “We really are going to do a reboot there, and what that’s going to be we don’t even know yet. It’s a hybrid … It’s an evolution. There’s still continuity that’s going on, and yet there’ll be a lot of new cast. We don’t even know yet [about the old cast]. But the characters that would certainly come along would be Optimus and Bumblebee, I’m sure.”

Sure about fictional entities Optimus and Bumblebee! Unsure about anything that is of flesh and blood?! This is it. It’s happening. Michael Bay is going to digitize Shia LaBeouf’s essence, download it into a really annoying Dodge Challenger, and be done with humans forever.