At the end of “Rise of the Beasts,” the Autobots (aliens from Cybertron who turn into vehicles), the Maximals (Cybertronians who turn into beasts — stay with me, here), and human heroes Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) and Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) are attempting to stop the Terrorcons (evil Cybertronian robot folks) from opening a portal to deepest space and allowing the planet-eating Unicron (Colman Domingo) to come through to devour Earth.

During the battle, Autobot warrior Mirage (Pete Davidson) is wounded but manages to transform himself into an exo-suit that Noah wears. Meanwhile, Autobot leader Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) attempts to save everyone by sacrificing himself while destroying the portal-opening Transwarp Key but is ultimately snatched from the brink of death by Noah/Mirage and Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), leader of the Maximals. Later, it’s revealed that Noah manages to resurrect Mirage thanks to rebuilding him with spare parts.

As Caple Jr. explained to The Hollywood Reporter, the original ending was too much of a downer and needed to be changed to what ended up on the screen:

“There was a version of the film where Prime went up into space. I think you guys are gonna see this in the deleted cuts, too, but when he actually destroyed the [Transwarp] Key, he got sucked up into the portal and ended up with Unicron. And then there was also a moment where Mirage didn’t come back. So I personally thought that movie was good; we were still getting pretty good ratings around that, but something was missing. And when I realized there wasn’t an applause or a cheer at the victory, it just felt a little down. So we wanted to see the heroes win: Optimus Prime, Noah, Elena. And so I went back and made sure that we had these victories throughout because it just felt a little sad.”