Michael Bay was promoting Transformers 4 and Pain & Gain earlier this week at CinemaCon. During his presentation, he mentioned that there have been other “rip-off” robot movies lately that audiences don’t accept. He was likely talking about the underperforming Battleship and Reel Steel. But it isn’t very noteworthy when someone states a fact that a movie bombed when it did bomb, so some people in attendance speculated he might have been talking about Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim instead.
The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Guillermo del Toro at CinemaCon, asking his opinion on Bay’s comments.
“We are far, far, far away from [Transformers] in a very willing fashion,” del Toro says. “For good or bad, [Pacific Rim] is my movie. This is my universe and my creation, and I do not create through comparison.” […] “The fights don’t occur in well-lit, supercool, car commercial-looking environments,” del Toro says. “They occur in the middle of a raging sea storm or in a savage snowstorm. They happen in a universe that is incredibly saturated.” […] On a lighter note, del Toro says his robots could crush every “robot in the history of mankind in a toe-to-toe showdown.” [THR, emphasis ours]
So, yeah. Bay may not have even insulted del Toro, but somebody told del Toro he did to get a good quote for their paper, and a new beef was started. This is like that time in middle school when a bunch of kids told Mike that Josh was totally talking sh-t about him, and then they told Josh that Mike said to fight him in the parking lot after school, and then we all gathered in a circle in the parking lot and chanted, “Fight, fight, fight” while Mike and Josh stared confusedly at each other. Because we didn’t have internet back then. Damn kids these days.