During a press tour for Jake Gyllenhaal movie AmbuLAnce, Michel Bay admitted that he should have stopped making Transformers movies, certainly after the third one. But they just kept raking in huge sums of money. Speaking to UniLad, Bay said; “I made too many of them. Steven Spielberg said, ‘Just stop at three.’ And I said I’d stop. 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. They were fun to do.”
While the first Transformers movie was enjoyable, they pretty much got worse as they went along and even the introduction of Dinobots and King Arthur couldn’t save the franchise. The last one, starring Mark Wahlberg, could muster up only 15% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The franchise could be resurrected by the much more critically-acclaimed Bumblebee, starring Hailee Steinfeld, which managed a 90% approval rating on the review aggregator site.
Bay seems happy to be helming a much smaller-scale action movies like AmbuLAnce, even if it is still chock-full of Bayisms and explosions.
If you’re a fan of Michael Bay, check out our guide to the best action movies.