Actor, Musician, And Hamburger Salesman Mark Wahlberg Exists In The Transformers Universe, And We Have Questions
Spoilers follow.
If there's a single franchise with lore and a timeline as confusing as the "Fast and Furious" series, it has to be the live-action "Transformers" movies. What started as a relatively simple and overly stylized adaptation of the beloved toys spiraled into a convoluted mess that kept retroactively adding new things to its history, like when Autobots helped kill Hitler or when planet Earth was literally revealed to be a slumbering Transformer.
That was even before the franchise went back in time with "Bumblebee," a pseudo prequel that is also a reboot that erased much of the history established in the Michael Bay movies. Suddenly, Bumblebee was not around to help the Allies in WWII but actually arrived on Earth much later. Likewise, "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" erases the fact that planet Earth was Unicron all along, instead making Unicron the main villain and having him trapped in another galaxy and trying to eat Earth.
While the "Fast and Furious" movies and their endless retcons are held together by the theme of family, the "Transformers" movies are held together by the ludicrous amounts of money half of them have made, and a sheer resolve to never give up trying to make an actually good "Transformers" movie.
"Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" does arguably the biggest and weirdest canon-breaking bit in the franchise by absolutely shattering the fourth wall and introducing Marky Mark himself, Mark Wahlberg, into the franchise canon.
Just a joke, or something else?
In the film, when Anthony Ramos' Noah realizes the car he stole is actually a living robot named Mirage (voiced by none other than Pete Davidson, somehow the best part of the movie), the Autobot starts just spouting opinions on pop culture. He takes great offense at being compared to E.T., and then mentions in absolute horror that Marky Mark is leaving the Funky Bunch to "try out this whole acting thing." A clear fan of the Funky Bunch, Mirage is skeptical of the move and says it's never gonna work out.
If you're like us, you may be confused by that joke because, as we all know, Mark Wahlberg — formerly of the Funky Bunch — was the star of not one, but two "Transformers" movies. Wahlberg, of course, plays Cade Yeager, a mechanic and inventor living in Texas with his daughter in both "Age of Extinction" and "The Last Knight."
What does this even mean? Given that "Rise of the Beasts" takes place in the '90s and Wahlberg's "Transformers" movies take place in the 2010s, there's enough time to explain the reference as more than just a cheeky joke. Is Cade Yeager just a huge Wahlberg fan? Did he get plastic surgery to look like the real actor? Or, is Mark Wahlberg actually playing himself, and his acting career went so bad in the "Transformers" universe that he changed his name and became a Texan inventor? I'm leaning toward the latter.
The legacy of Marky Mark
Unfortunately, we don't have straight answers, but we do know how the joke came together. Speaking with io9, director Steven Caple Jr. explained that Pete Davidson himself made up the joke on the spot.
"We laughed so hard we were like in tears. And we're like, 'There's no way we cannot use this.' We had ad-libbed a whole bunch of stuff. One was on Beanie Babies. [Then] he was like, 'What about Marky Mark leaving the Funky Bunch?' And we were just in tears. And then we showed the studio and everybody loved it and were like, let's just break the fourth wall and do it."
Not all jokes have to have some deeper meaning for the overall canon. Sometimes a fourth wall break can be just that. Still, this is "Transformers," so the idea of Mark Wahlberg the actor actually being Cade Yeager not only makes sense but is as logical as anything else in the film.