Scourge's grill is decorated with insignias taken from his slain enemies. The insignias are of various factions from Transformers history: Autobot, Decepticon, Maximal, Predacon, Mercenary, Terrorcon, and Wrecker.
During filming in Peru, a Peruvian child showed his Transformers drawings to director Steven Caple Jr., and in response, Caple invited him to the premiere, and paid to renovate his school's roof.
When Scourge taunts Optimus Prime by saying "Primus would be ashamed", this marks the first time that the Transformers' creator god from the 1980s Marvel Comic series, Primus, is mentioned in the live-action movies. According to most versions of Transformers lore, Primus was the ancient rival or brother of the evil Unicron. Both were cosmic beings who battled across different universes, until their souls were trapped in two asteroids that they turned into planets over time. Primus became the planet Cybertron where he created the thirteen Primes, robotic deities who then created the different Transformers types.
There is a widely held misconception that Optimus Prime's face in this movie has been visually based on his voice actor Peter Cullen because director Steven Caple Jr. has claimed as such in online comments. CGI artist Rassoul Edji, who was responsible for redesigning Optimus' face for the film, denied that this was true and explained that Caple was not involved with the design. Instead, the studio executives merely wanted to evoke Optimus' design from Transformers (2007) with some changes to allow his face to emote better. Furthermore, Optimus Prime technically has two face designs in the film: in the first half of the movie (with CGI animation by MPC), he has a cheek guard resembling the helmets of medieval knights, which disappears in the movie's second half (animated by WETA using a different CGI model).
Scourge's truck mode resembles the villainous truck from Duel (1971), which was directed by Transformers executive producer Steven Spielberg. The Transformers insignias from Scourge's victims on the grill reference the license plates on the earlier truck, which Spielberg said belonged to the victims of the truck driver.