Steven Caple Jr. is a director of people who need a job, handed two franchises that need a plot. He keeps the camera on the human for as long as the studio lets him, and his films are at their best while he does.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in the first act of a Steven Caple Jr. film a man stands in an ordinary room and needs work. In Creed II (2018) it is a champion who has run out of people to fight and the son of the man who killed Apollo Creed in the ring. In Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) it is a man in Brooklyn, in a year the film is careful to name, who needs a job and is not going to get one from a robot. Caple Jr. gives his franchise films a street and a kitchen before he gives them a fight, and the street and the kitchen are the parts we remember.
He arrived quickly. A Different Tree (2014) was a student short; The Land (2016), his first feature, was a coming-of-age story set in his native Cleveland, and it is the last time he worked without somebody else's furniture already in place. Ryan Coogler, who had been at USC with him and directed Creed (2015), recommended him for the sequel, and Caple Jr. has spent the years since inside other people's series: Stallone's, then Michael Bay's. Man on Fire (2026) is next.
What he does well is actors and rooms. Creed II is well acted and cleanly shot in the ring, with the camera close enough to the punches that we flinched. Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone carry it; Dolph Lundgren, saying almost nothing, walks off with it, and we were moved, more than we expected to be by a Rocky sequel, by how little he is given to say and how much he does with it. What Caple Jr. does not do is surprise. The film runs Rocky IV (1985) again a generation down and for 130 minutes never does a thing we had not seen coming from the poster.
Transformers shows both sides at scale. For an hour it is the most likeable thing the main series has done, a step up from the Bay films and a retreat from Bumblebee (2018), which trusted one girl and one car where Caple Jr. juggles a dozen relationships and drops most of them. Then the plot arrives, and a hole in the sky, and the shouting, and the film he was making disappears under the one he was hired for. He can stage the spectacle. He cannot stop it.
He has said he wants audiences to care about Optimus Primal rather than just find him cool. On the evidence so far he has got us caring about the humans in a Transformers film, which the main series had not managed before, and the robots remain robots. Both films are worth an evening if you know what you are buying. What we would like to see is the Cleveland director given a man, a job and a room, and no sky at all.
Biography
Steven Caple Jr. is an American film and television director, producer and screenwriter. He was born on 16 February 1988 in Cleveland, Ohio, and studied film and marketing at Baldwin Wallace University before earning an MFA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2013.
His feature debut The Land (2016) premiered at Sundance. He directed Creed II (2018) and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023). He has also directed episodes of series including Grown-ish and Transformers: EarthSpark. In 2017 Forbes named him one of its 30 Under 30 in Hollywood & Entertainment.
