-Steven Caple Jr. has said that aspects of Rise of the Beasts were inspired by the Unicron comic miniseries of IDW1 that capped off EXRID and TAAO (really all of the IDW1 Hasbroverse except MTMTE/Lost Light, will note we're currently unsure if the Clue stuff was still going) save for it's final issue (Post), so while someone would need to ask to confirm we feel like this is clearly why Arcee is Optimus's right hand in the film
-Earthspark Arcee is so very clearly inspired by IDW Arcee in part while doing her own thing. the teaching (also an Animated aspect), the martial arts and incredible feats therein (in this case though unarmed), Robby literally asks her if she'll teach her "berserker rage" etc.
-Transformers One Arcee has cheek guards extended from her helm that are the kind of thing IDW Arcee is known for (and began with Binaltech Arcee with much thicker armor herein, and it's unclear if those two are related in that way)
So with all that in mind, just some thoughts/desires on the future of Arcee in film/animation in regards to film/animation:
Basically, while we think there's nothing wrong with casting cisgender voice actors for versions of Arcee who are in part inspired by her canonically trans and transcoded iterations, we hope that someday they go all the way and have a transfemme voice actor for her with a major role, at least once, if not more than once. Our dream would be if they ever also do a film focused on Arcee and it has multiverse theming that she'd get to team up with a number of other Arcees based on other continuities (and like, in that case the gender spectrum of the voice actors could obviously vary more than the vastness of the transfeminine spectrum). I dunno. The thing Mae Catt said about wanting Earthspark Arcee to be trans gave us some hope in addition to all this that we might actually get a version of her that is outside of the comics sometime in the next decade, and maybe actually have her gender journey touched on. I mean, there's two different explicitly trans Arcees in canon, one in Ask Vector Prime and the other one in IDW1, off of whom basically all of the IDW Arcees who came after are iterated off of to some degree (including crossovers. Sidenote, her TTRPG bio in the Autobot book is definitely based on her, and Gauge's bio in her pregen character sheet in the starter box set directly references Arcee has her mentor. This also came with a sheet for Anode that touched on a new version of her own trans journey!). We think both trans narratives are very adaptable considering what IDW1 Arcee's end up being in the end as someone who sought gender affirming surgery during a time when gender variation was being abandoned on her world, was betrayed by her transmedicalist surgeon, and as a survivor managed to carve out a future with the help of another trans gal for a time and eventually found her way back into transformer and galactic conflict on her own terms, finally finding community, love, and a job that didn't involve fighting and a shape she adored in the postwar era after the hierarchies that had bothered her were finally mostly gone (if you want to read about this we have an essay about it and also the conceptual origins section of her IDW1 tfwiki page has a shorter overview of how her narrative changed quite a lot over the years). AVP Arcee's story of kicking off a gender revolution in understandings and gender affirming care is also rather beautiful (you can check out the archived official Ask Vector Prime 1.0 entry here). They could also combine both or just tell a different story with a transfemme version of her. We'd be happy with any of those four possibilities 💜🏳️⚧️
There are voicedubs of IDW1 Arcee where transfemme voice actors were sought out, can't that happen for something official too? Voice dubs have way less resources so usually getting more than one person to do a whole dub is already a lot
We (as in our system) owe her and the other transfemme and sapphic transformers our she pronouns you know? We love her, and we know other people love her too