He made a mistake, ok? Leave him alone already!
Michael Bay’s really, really sorry guys. Not for any of his most recent movies – which, you know, stripped the membranes of our brains – but for real footage of a fatal plane crash used in the latest movie his production company is producing, Project Almanac. According to The Guardian, Bay apologized for the error, and will heroically delete the two-second shot from the film.
Apparently, Bay’s editors used actual footage of the 1994 B-52 crash, which killed four Air Force officers. Families of victims then complained, and Bay passed the buck onto his irresponsible first-time director:
“Unfortunately today I learned that the movie Project Almanac, produced by my Platinum Dunes company, directed by a talented first-time director, used a two-second shot in a grainy news clip of a real B-52 crash. When the director presented his cut to me, I actually thought the short clip was a created visual effect like many of the other shots in the film.”
“I let film directors make their movies at Platinum Dunes and give them tremendous responsibilities. Well, unfortunately a very bad choice was made to use a real crash instead of creating a VFX shot, without realizing the impact it could have on the families.”
Paramount has agreed to delete the clip from the film, scheduled to be in theaters January 30th. To be honest, I’m not quite sure why Almanac needed the footage in the first place. The story centers on four teenagers who build a time machine and try to go back to the past to correct their mistakes. In the process, they discover that time machines aren’t all they cracked up to be (whodathunk!) and then something something fatal B-52 crash. You can check out the trailer here, if you haven’t been forced to watch it in theaters ten thousand times already.