Malkovich and McDormand join Transformers

April Fool’s Day is still over a week away, but this story really had us wondering if we’d woken up after accidentally sleeping for a week.

See, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand have both signed on to Michael Bay’s Transformers 3 . The latter will have a big role as the National Intelligence Director, and Malkovich will play Shia Labeouf’s character’s first boss.

The director also revealed the shooting locations for the threequel, writing that “LA, Chicago, Washington DC, Florida, Texas, Africa, Moscow, and China” are all on the list. Pre-shoots are set to commence in about a month’s time.

Finally, a new Autobot was revealed on Bay’s site – taking the form of the Ferrari 458 Italia. Slick. No word yet just which character this new ‘bot will be and what part it will play in the film.

Transformers 3 is set to be released in July 2011, a whisker under two years after the second robot mash-up

A sign of good things to come, or that anybody will sell their soul if the price is right?

Josh Winning has worn a lot of hats over the years. Contributing Editor at Total Film, writer for SFX, and senior film writer at the Radio Times. Josh has also penned a novel about mysteries and monsters, is the co-host of a movie podcast, and has a library of pretty phenomenal stories from visiting some of the biggest TV and film sets in the world. He would also like you to know that he "lives for cat videos..." Don't we all, Josh. Don't we all.