Only Michael Bay Said He was Done With Transformers!
For the last few years we know that Michael Bay has said that he was only working on a trilogy of films for the Transformers movie franchise that he kicked back into the limelight.
For fans of the franchise, it was a bit a dreary piece of news that he would only make three movies. He pulled the franchise out of the past and into mainframe CGI and 3D movies. And despite hard-core movie critics having field days with the franchise, movie fans spoke volumes with their money.
Transformers: ($709M); Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen ($836M); Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon ($1.11B). (Worldwide gross #’s)
And for Hasbro’s bucket of money, TF1 helped pull in over $400M in sales, TF2: $600M. Transformers 3 has helped boost 3rd quarter profits to $171M so far.
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TRANSFORMERS products on Amazon
And as Michael Bay promised, there would be shocking deaths and goodbyes in Transformers 3, and he definitely made it his swan song of a farewell to the franchise.
(Speaking of TF3, did anyone catch all the nods to different things in TF3? There were Predator looking Decepticons, there was a Decepticon that looked an awful lot like the Cloverfield monster… and then there was the reference to how mean Sam Witwicky’s last girlfriend was. If you know that whole story!)
But as the curtain closed on TF3, I had to wonder just how Michael Bay could pull off stepping away from the franchise as it made so much money for Paramount Pictures and Hasbro Toys.
And especially after taking out some primary players in his third Transformers chapter!
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But alas, news on the street says that during a Hasbro earnings conference call, Hasbro is panting about continuing the film franchise.
So for the moment, Hasbro, Paramount, Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay are noted as being in discussions about the franchise.
But as it goes, say Michael Bay is swayed to return, other word on the street is that Shia LaBeouf is trying to move past this huge money-maker movie franchise. So far, all the RUMORS are pointing to Jason Statham as stepping up.
To be honest, that might be a nice change of pace with Statham, bringing in new characters and creating a new story to append to the back story we already have…
Even if I did like LaBeouf’s huge girlie scream that he’s mustered up for the last two Transformers movies. (Gotta admit, those two scenes do have their humor value.)
And of course, if they are looking at moving forward, the details indicate that we would then be probably be seeing two more movies at least… Transformers 4 and Transformers 5, and that they would be pulling off that stunt where two movies are filmed back to back or at the same time, to save even more money off the bill of the billion dollar making movie production.
The idea for both TF4 and TF5, right now, is something everyone seems to like from the screenplay writer for TF3, Ehren Kruger.
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Sidenote: Michael Bay seems to have a full plate of production projects coming up… The Monster Squad, Confidential Alien Project, The Hauntrepreneur, Ouija, The Birds, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, & Bad Boys 3. Of course, it remains to be seen which of, if any of these projects pans out.
[Empire Online]