There was a point back in the golden age of 21st-century big-budget franchise movies when you couldn’t go anywhere without some sort of Transformers tie-in. There were video games! SNL skits! Even some pretty ugly Nike sneakers. So, when the studio asked director Michael Bay to make more movies, he had to say yes. Even though…they weren’t good.
In a new interview with Unilad UK, Bay admitted that he should have quit while he was ahead. Fellow director Steven Spielberg also warned him against doing too many. “Steven Spielberg said, ‘Just stop at three.’ And I said I’d stop,” Bay recalled. “The studio begged me to do a fourth, and then that made a billion, too. And then I said I’m gonna stop here. And they begged me again. I should have stopped. [But] they were fun to do.”
Fun for some, not for others (Megan Fox, to be specific) the movies did make a lot of money, which makes sense as the early 2000s were the glory days of CGI.
Bay ended up doing four Transformers titles, concluding with the critically-panned The Last Knight in 2017. Of course, Paramount wanted more, so they rebooted the series in 2018 with the release of Bumblebee starring Hailee Steinfeld.
The upcoming film Transformers: Rise Of The Beast will take place in the 90s and is expected to hit theaters next summer. It should be noted that Bay is not involved with that one. He does know when to quit, apparently. It just took him a few years to figure it out.
