Here’s something that might surprise you: Michael Bay’s four Transformers features, while loud and messy and robotic, have never required more than three credited writers. In fact, the last two films only have one. Transformers just seems like the kind of property that would require a lot of, ahem, input. Just a lot of voices, really, a lot of ideas. A lot of explosions. It just feel likes the kind of franchise that has a lot of cooks in the kitchen.

Looks like that Transformers kitchen (big portions) is about to get a lot more packed with the addition of a slew of names to a brand new “brain trust” and “writers room” meant to “incubate ideas” for new sequels and spin-offs based on the beloved cartoon turned huge blockbuster franchise.

Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg, and Lorezno di Bonaventura previously picked Akiva Goldsman to think up ideas for films for the smashy/grabby alien robots, and Deadline reports that Goldsman has now picked his very own stable of talents to help bring them to fruition: Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (Iron Man), Zak Penn (Amazing Spider-Man 2), and Jeff Pinkner (Lost). How many writers does it take to write a new Transformers film? A lot. Furthermore, it’s expected that the team will add still more writers.

As of now, there is no word on how many new features we can expect to see and how this room will shake out (Is everyone collaborating on everything? Have writers started picking out pet projects? Will Shia LaBeouf come back?), but it certainly looks like we are in for more new Transformers features than is probably good for our necks (bad car joke).

We already know that the four-film-spawning franchise is supposedly due for a handful of Mark Wahlberg-starring sequels, and considering how well the series has done at the box office and how much people love alien robots (I’m a Dinobot gal, myself), Transformers does seem like the sort of franchise that can go on forever (no snark here, just perhaps mild fear). The last Transformers feature, though technically a sequel to the first trilogy, basically rebooted the series, something that Michael Bay and company can probably keep pulling off until the audience dries up or the wheels fall off.