A little while back, I posted a review on the latest entry into Michael Bay’s Transformers movies: The Last Knight. I didn’t hate the movie entirely, but it was an absolutely insane shit-show. If I graded the film based on action alone, I would have given the film a solid 10/10. The action was phenomenal. It’s just that the movie surrounding the action wasn’t so hot. The acting, while mostly passable, failed to connect with the audience and the story was just made absolutely no sense whatsoever. So…what’s coming up for the franchise? Paramount has announced a while back that they are planning at least 13 more movies in the Transformers universe, but considering how poorly received The Last Knight was, they may want to rethink that. We are getting a spin-off which is supposed to be due next year. It’s going to be about Bumblebee and is supposed to be set in the 80s. Apparently, they want to give him an actual voice and the design from the animated show. I’m very curious. Is it going to be any good? Hard to say. Michael Bay is only going to produce the movie, not direct it. Bumblebee is an interesting enough Transformer to warrant his own movie, so I’m willing to see how that goes. As for a sequel to The Last Knight? That’s a little difficult to answer.
Based on the current numbers on Box Office Mojo, Transformers 5 has pulled in well over 400 million dollars world-wide. The film bombed in the States, pulling in barely over 100 million dollars on a 217 million dollar budget. If it wasn’t for the international market, The Last Knight would be a complete disaster for Paramount studios. It’s not even performing as well as Age of Extinction. Not even close. What needs to happen for Transformers 6 to be better than the previous effort, is to jettison Michael Bay entirely. He’s a great action director. He knows how to frame it and shoot it. The issue is that he can’t seem to hire proper writers to be able to tell a coherent story or even give us compelling characters. Not only that, the humor almost always falls flat. If you took out all the humor and most of the exposition, you would end up with a 2 hour movie. That’s all we really needed. Now, we know that Unicron is going to make himself known at some point in the next movie or two. There’s no getting around it, since they mentioned him multiple times. How that’s going to happen, I don’t know. Apparently the big guy is hiding underneath our planet, and the Transformers’ creator, Quintessa, wants to destroy him to give life back to Cybertron. What the next movie needs to happen is to focus entirely on the Transformers themselves and their potential battle with Unicron. If you want a good starting off point, check out the original animated Transformers film from 1986. That film introduced Unicron and made him feel like a legitimate threat. This is Unicron, for those who don’t know:
What I want to see from Transformers 6, is Michael Bay completely removed from the picture entirely. I don’t even want him producing the picture. We also need to hire writers that have at least SOME respect for the source material. The people that wrote the last 4 movies have done a major disservice to not only the source material, but also the fans as well. I’m sorry, the only movie that didn’t flat out suck in any way was the first film. Also, we need to get rid of the human characters. Nobody goes to a Transformers movie for human drama. We want to go these movies to see giant shape-shifting robots wreck shit. So far, the only movie that has managed to deliver on ALL counts is the original animated film, and that’s over 30 years old. Michael Bay doesn’t even seem to care anymore, as all he sees is dollar signs. Well, the performance of The Last Knight should tell Paramount Pictures that some adjustments need to be made. I know that Paramount wants a cinematic universe with Transformers, as that seems to be the “in” thing these days, but if they fuck up Unicron and that particularly story-line, a lot of people, including myself, will stop going to these movies.