Transformers 4

[Alak]

Yep, Michael Bay's making another one.

http://movies.ign.com/articles/121/1218632p1.html

[Phoenix]

Oh geez, I was partially hoping he'd pass it along to someone else. He already killed off all the main Decepticons, so guess the next one won't have a plot beyond just big explosions going off.

[Alak]

He still hasn't used Unicron. Bay could definitely put in a good 5-10 minutes of us watching a massive transformer-god blow up bit by bit on screen. The rest of the movie could be random Unicron-induced explosions with random inserts of uplifting Optimus Prime quotes.

[Phoenix]

Heh, I actually never liked any Michael Bay movie I've seen. Sorry to say I found TF3 to be less than appealing. Guess I was just looking for a bit more substance than closeups of a model running around in high heels without even getting a stain on her skirt while there's explosions going off all around her.. The only character I found even remotely interesting was Sentinel Prime.

[Sapphire]

Warning: If you're a fan of the Bayformers, you may want to ignore my post!

Wholeheartedly agree with you, Phoenix. As a feminist, I find Bay's misogynistic upskirt shots and "women are there to be eye candy and nothing else - no acting skill required!" attitude absolutely disgusting. Not to mention that the film is 90% explosions. There is no substance. I detest Michael Bay and what he has done to the Transformers, but then, I am first and foremost a Beast Wars fan, so I guess my introduction to the TF world was one of depth, plot, amazing and complex characters etc. I TRIED to like Bay's films, I really did, but the more I reflected on them, the more I despised them. The fact he's directing the next two only makes me want to nuke Hollywood. (Am grumpy - can you tell? )

[una]

I agree with you, Sapphire.

I felt that the Transformer movies were wasted potential.

[Beastbot]

I think they serve their purpose pretty well. If you want a deep modern character-driven Transformers story starring just or mostly Transformers, you've got plenty of options-- the IDW comics, the Prime TV series, the novels, the upcoming Fall of Cybertron video game. But, for budgetary, marketing, and time reasons, you're simply not going to get that in a series that has one 2-hr 15-min story every 2-3 years (ignoring the movie comics, granted, but those serve as mere back-ups to the story and obviously can't do anything really game-changing). This is going to be the case regardless of the director. So instead the movies do what they can do best, and that no other medium of Transformers can do quite as well-- offer mind-blowing high-res robot action on big setpieces. Plus I generally like the movie aesthetic, too, with Mudflap, Brains, and Que/Wheeljack's head being the only notable exceptions. So consider me all aboard for another rousing explosion-fest featuring wonderful robotic eye candy!

[Alak]

Problem: none of those "alternatives" are live-action. If, not saying that they will, but if Paramount chose to reboot the series, I think a director such as J.J. Abrams would do well with the source material given to him. Other sci-fi filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg (as a director not a producer) and Neill Blomkamp have proven that they can also create something emotionally and visually engaging. Bryan Singer is also an adequate choice, although he's been a hit-or-miss for me. All these directors showed that it is possible to create a 2-hour adventure that gives us plenty of action while stimulating our minds and hearts.

What do you guys think?

***EDIT***

I hope they keep Steve Jablonsky as the composer, though. The man's done a fantastic job thus far.

[Beastbot]

Well, there WAS no such thing as live-action Transformers before 2007. So I'm not sure why suddenly Transformers fiction without a live-action setting would be somehow lacking.

What I meant by marketing, financial factors, etc preventing something engaging on that level is something that the movies you're thinking about directed by Spielberg, Abrams, Singer, etc do not revolve around live-action CGI characters to the extent that Transformers does. The only parallel I can think of that even comes close is Avatar, and even then the actors were still "human", just put into models that, while good, definitely weren't as complex and individualistic as a TF model. To see why we won't have TF movie like what you mean, let's break it down:
--TF movies are based on toys and are the primary driver for selling those toy lines. As such, a pretty sizable number of new TF characters have to be introduced in each movie, to make toys of them. So time given per character is significantly lessened.
--It's a movie series, not a comic or TV series. Thus even LESS time is given per character. You cannot take entire chunks/episodes to focus on a character and build them up because you simply don't have the time. So, particularly for characters that aren't the "main guys" like Optimus, Bumblebee, and Megatron, the only way to get across a robot's personality very quickly is what they've been doing. Relying on accents, stereo/archetypes, etc. so that the audience can "fill in" the rest. Plus it's Transformers, an action franchise, so they aren't exactly going to stand around talking all the time they're onscreen.
--The Transformers models cost an insane amount of time money for every minute of screen time they have. They each have thousands of individual moving parts. Heck, they had to animate Devastator in RotF one limb at a time because even ILM's computers couldn't handle the strain of rendering all of him at once! This translates into, yet again, less time they can spend on the Transformers themselves, thus the "padding out" of the movies with the various human characters. Also note that even now they still "cheat" a bit by not showing many of the Transformers actually transforming on-screen, like Que/Wheeljack, the Wreckers, the Twins in RotF, Shockwave not transforming period, etc.

So like I said, when you consider all of those factors together, I think the kind of stories you're expecting are kind of unrealistic. Now, of course even within those confines certain points could be better, like some of the editing and what Sapphire mentioned, but I don't really get the expectation for the kind of stories you're talking about.
I mean, I guess if the movies were the ONLY thing we were getting fiction-wise I could understand the hunger for something deeper but Transfans have a plethora of various fiction choices to choose from nowadays. Many of them brought about by--let's be honest--the success of the movies. So even if you hate the movies, TF4 is likely a good thing because it means more money/funds to produce the other Transformers fiction choices you DO like.

[Alak]

Well, there WAS no such thing as live-action Transformers before 2007. So I'm not sure why suddenly Transformers fiction without a live-action setting would be somehow lacking.

I'm not hating on Michael Bay for starting the live-action Transformers series. I won't say he did a good job at it, but I'll give him props for showing us that it can be done with financial success. With that being said, Paramount and Hasbro are aware that a live-action Transformers movie will bring in money regardless of its quality. Therefore, give the audience a Transformer movie that actually does incorporate other elements aside from special effects and useless hot girls.

What I meant by marketing, financial factors, etc preventing something engaging on that level is something that the movies you're thinking about directed by Spielberg, Abrams, Singer, etc do not revolve around live-action CGI characters to the extent that Transformers does.

Each Transformer movie that Bay has done ranged from a $150-$200 million budget. Look at Abrams' budgets for sci-fi movies with similar amounts of CGI special effects: Super 8 ($50 million), Star Trek ($150 million), Cloverfield ($25 million). Look at Spielberg's budgets: A.I. Artificial Intelligence ($100 million), Minority Report ($102 million), War of the Worlds ($132 million), The Adventures of Tintin ($132 million). Look at Bryan Singer's budgets: X-men franchise ($75-160 million). Even George Lucas' prequel trilogy cost $120 million at the most (Attack of the Clones) and his movies still got better reviews than Transformers despite using more CGI.

All of these directors succeeded in making better movies than Bay's Transformers trilogy, and they did it with a lower budget. Just imagine what would happen if you actually gave them the additional $50 million to be on an even playing field as Michael Bay! The Lucas vs. Bay comparison is the best because Lucas uses the most CGI VFX in the movie industry and he pulled off a more critically and financially successful trilogy than Bay did with a significantly lower budget. What's the difference? The staff is the difference. Worse director (Bay has only 1 positively received movie in his career), worse actors (primarily the female roles), worse writers (Bay changed his lead screenplay writer after the 1st film), and set placements (more costly to film at popular shooting sites).

--TF movies are based on toys and are the primary driver for selling those toy lines. As such, a pretty sizable number of new TF characters have to be introduced in each movie, to make toys of them. So time given per character is significantly lessened.

That was never the problem with the movies. No one complained about the Transformers themselves (aside from G1 purists). Optimus and Bumblebee got their primary screentime while everyone else was a clear secondary. The criticism from the movies come from the human actors, the writing, the shot decisions, etc. Screentime for the a particular Transformer was never a serious issue except for fanboys.

To sum up:

- Money isn't an issue.
- Screen time for the Transformers isn't an issue.

The issue stems from the people involved with the project. Hire a new director, hire new actors, and hire a new writer. Keep the voice actors, keep the stunt choreographers, keep the composer, keep the sound team, keep the deal with ILM, and keep the deal with GM. Paramount isn't spending any additional money on staff or advertising. They're simply replacing one person for another. Again, props to Michael Bay for taking the first stab at live-action Transformers, but everyone knows it's very much possible (and affordable) to make an even better movie. No one wants to own a movie for the sake of merely fast-forwarding straight to the fight scenes. To try and defend that will only limit us to the garbage we have now.


***EDIT***

In case my financial argument was too confusing, let me use an analogy:

Director A is given $200 million to make a movie. He doesn't do a good job. Therefore, I'll give that $200 million budget to Director B so that he will make a better movie. No matter which person I give the movie to, I know I'll still be #1 at the box office. I'll still have the same visual effects and intensity. The difference is that Director B will make a better movie due to his superior skill set. This is how the mind of a financial backer works.

[Beastbot]

Each Transformer movie that Bay has done ranged from a $150-$200 million budget. Look at Abrams' budgets for sci-fi movies with similar amounts of CGI special effects: Super 8 ($50 million), Star Trek ($150 million), Cloverfield ($25 million). Look at Spielberg's budgets: A.I. Artificial Intelligence ($100 million), Minority Report ($102 million), War of the Worlds ($132 million), The Adventures of Tintin ($132 million). Look at Bryan Singer's budgets: X-men franchise ($75-160 million). Even George Lucas' prequel trilogy cost $120 million at the most (Attack of the Clones) and his movies still got better reviews than Transformers despite using more CGI.

I understood your point; I'm aware of the rough budgets of the Transformers movies and the movies you mentioned. But you're completely missing the main crux of my argument-- Transformers movies, and what their intended accomplishment is, is a wholly unique case among all of those. You're assuming amount of CGI seen= cost, but the models in every single one of the movies you mentioned are far less complex than the Transformers models. All of your movies also star humans (or humans in makeup & prosthetics) as all or nearly all of the main characters. The closest thing on that list that comes to the situation Transformers movies are in are the Star Wars prequels, in that they also had a bunch of characters that were in a toyline, but only a small handful of characters that were in those movies and were not merely in the background were actually completely CGI, and again, far less complex models so less cost and time was involved in each of them. There really is no movie out there comparable to the situation of the 3 Transformers movies in terms of number of incredibly complex CGI characters, and therein lies my point. In fact, one of the main reasons Bay was chosen as a director in the first place is because he's known for a brutal, quick shooting schedule and completing at or under budget, so more time/money can be spent on the Transformers models themselves.

[Alak]

Ok, but how does the complexity of the CGI character affect the quality of the story? How does the number of renderings per transformer determine the best director? The answer: they don't. Trust me, I work in media and graphic design and I even run my own company. Complexity =/= quality of the piece. Let me provide you an example:

Michael Bay chooses to throw in a minor action scene that requires, say, only 14 sequences. ILM then has to take his storyboard and animate each sequence. According for their graphics artists, it takes a full work day to render a single frame (per worker). Assuming we're talking about high-end visualization, it takes about 50-60 frames to move an object from one side of your television to another side. Rendering 14 different angled shots would put us at roughly 700-840 frames for ILM workers to create from scratch and integrate into a life-action environment. I'm not going to even touch on how much memory your render farm has to have just to pull that off.

Now imagine a dialogue scene between, I dunno, Optimus and Ratchet where the two are discussion a controversial measure to respond to some world-ending threat. ILM would be animating and render much less body motion. They wouldn't have to worry about flares, explosion, placement of flying shrapnel, etc. This also applies to heart-to-heart scenes, emotionally touching scenes, and so forth. Not only would that cut cost of production, but it would also significantly improve the story if the director chose to implement these kinds of moments with the Transformers.

That's my response to your "complexity" argument, in which we'd be requiring less effort on behalf of ILM's artists while improving the quality of the scene overall. Anyway, my usage of those directors was to argue that they didn't need complex CGI models in order to visually stimulate the audience. Do transformers need to have random pieces of themselves moving at all time? No, they certainly do not and that was a call by Michael Bay that was never seen before in this lore. If we need to have that to make them visually convincing, then the future movies could emulate High Moon Studios and have pumps and panels shift instead of insignificant trinkets and such. Now, as for primary characters, we're obviously on different pages since you're insisting that the Transformers were the main characters in Bay's trilogy (at least I think you are). If you look at the screentime, human characters have at least double the mount of minutes that the transformers did. Human characters were also one of the biggest criticisms of the series due to poor acting, terrible screen-writing, and obviously bad direction.

My proposition to fix this

- Cut screen time from human characters. Hire lesser known, or less demanding actors, who have more natural talent than the models that Bay tends to hire. This will save budget for Paramount studios since they won't have to give so much to the human actors. One very easy way to justify this pay cut would be to make humans as secondary characters instead of primary ones.

- Cut down the number of actions scenes. Sure, they make the movies more memorable and keep children happy, but I'm willing to bet if you asked a child about all the fight scenes in the movie, they'll most likely only name the final battle. That's how the child psyche works; only the biggest fight is remembered. Divide the number of fights in half, use the vacant scenes for more brain/heart-stirring scenes that make these transformers more developed. To us, they're not just toys. They are characters.

- Stop trying to film at really popular sites. Using the pyramids of Egypt was totally unnecessary and that decision is absolutely the sole reason why Revenge of the Fallen was the most costly movie to make. You don't have to use cities like Chicago because your cash will burn through your pocket from closing off main streets during filming. Most movies use footage from lesser known cities while telling audiences that the scene is taking place elsewhere. For example, Batman Begins had much less CGI and action large-scaled action scenes but still had the same budget as the first Transformers film. Why? Nolan shot in Chicago and England. Sure, it's fine to shoot in notable locations for scenes that don't involve paying off the city to reroute traffic due to some epic battle.

- We just saved up money from cutting down human roles as well as cutting down action sequences. How will we fulfill our $150-$200 million budget? We pour the rest of it into the primary action scenes. You only really need 3 action scenes to keep the audience hooked. A big fight must happen within the first 5 minutes to draw them in. A big fight (or two small ones) in the middle of the film keeps them awake. A big fight at the end to make you go home with that "wow" feeling. With the extra money saved from points #1 and #2 and #3, we could throw in more transformers or even extend more significant battles between the main good guy and the main bad guy.

^ There you go. I'm not a professional director, and I still found a formula that sets the foundation for a good transformers movie. Choose a screen writer to write a memorable story, find a choreographer to make mind-blowing battles, let Paramount's promotion team do what they do best, and you'll have yourself a movie that's just as financially successful as Bay's trilogy while impressing fans and critics alike. We shouldn't tell ourselves to stick to what we already have, especially if it's not that good. It is not only possible, but very easy to improve upon live-action transformers. Just replace Michael Bay.

[Beastbot]

Now imagine a dialogue scene between, I dunno, Optimus and Ratchet where the two are discussion a controversial measure to respond to some world-ending threat. ILM would be animating and render much less body motion. They wouldn't have to worry about flares, explosion, placement of flying shrapnel, etc. This also applies to heart-to-heart scenes, emotionally touching scenes, and so forth. Not only would that cut cost of production, but it would also significantly improve the story if the director chose to implement these kinds of moments with the Transformers.

I dunno about that. Those kinds of scenes would involve more close-up stuff, more subtle movement of parts that ILM wouldn't really need to worry about in action scenes where the camera is panned out more. Of course, said action sequences also would involve more TFs in one shot (usually) and shrapnel etc. calculcations, like you said... I guess I'll defer to your media design expertise on this matter I suppose, but I have my doubts it would be THAT much less time-consuming.

Do transformers need to have random pieces of themselves moving at all time? No, they certainly do not and that was a call by Michael Bay that was never seen before in this lore.

Your opinion. I think it makes them look considerably more believable in a real-life setting. In comics and cartoons you can get away with "bendy metal" faces, small parts colliding with each other, and all that, but not in CGI methinks. Regardless, that was actually not a call by Michael Bay. He didn't have much of anything to do with the Transformers movie design aesthetic-- that was all Hasbro.

Now, as for primary characters, we're obviously on different pages since you're insisting that the Transformers were the main characters in Bay's trilogy (at least I think you are). If you look at the screentime, human characters have at least double the mount of minutes that the transformers did.

No, I understand that. Hence the "padding out" with human characters and whatnot I mentioned; it'd be too expensive to have the TFs on the screen all the time, which is sort of a response to the "not enough TFs in Transformers" argument. But the movie revolves around the Transformers-- completely CGI chars-- while incorporating a real-world setting (i.e, not green screen) to an extent that no other movie does.

My proposition to fix this *snip*

First off, I want to make something clear here-- I'm not "accepting" your premise that the Transformers movies are bad. Could they be better? In some (IMO) minor areas, yes. But I still love and enjoy all three of them, DOTM far and away the most. I don't think there's a whole lot that necessarily needs fixing, I quite enjoy them. I was merely pointing out the constraints on the director et al. are under and tempering expectations accordingly.
But I think the larger and more important point here is that, from the POV of all the parties involved in making the movie, there is nothing that needs fixing. You can give different ideas about how to change the direction until the cows come home, but the fact is you don't know it would be successful any more than many Transfans in 2007 "knew" the first TF live action movie would bomb. You may know that YOU would like it more, but you don't know it would be successful. No director is bomb-proof.
But Hasbro, Paramount, and GM have a really extraordinary thing going here. The first movie far surpassed their expectations in terms of sales and box office returns, and each movie in the trilogy has outperformed the last. Obviously things can't continue to improve monetarily at quite this pace given how ridiculously well DOTM did (4th-highest worldwide gross of all time, not factoring in inflation), but the point is, WHY would they change anything? Hasbro's making loads of money off the toys, Paramount's making loads of money off the movies, GM and the other car companies involved get great product placement with a director who is experienced with shooting cars with just the right angle and lighting, and as said before, can do things under a strict timetable and at/under budget. As a business, you take risks and go in a new direction when your current direction is failing, NOT when it's doing as astoundingly well as the Bay movies have been doing. I mean, you simply can't do much better than DOTM in terms of sales. To change direction at this point in time would be antithetical to Hasbro's purpose with these movies. Why do you think they threw so much money at Bay for TF3 and now TF4? Bay at first wanted to take a break after TF2 like he's doing now and work on another movie before returning, so they must've offered him a heckuva lot of money to get him to go straight to TF3. And given that he swore up and down he was done with the franchise after TF3, they must've offered him even MORE for TF4. Why? Because you don't change direction at the top of your game unless there's no other choice, and Hasbro and Paramount know that. You go with more of the same.
You only take risks when things aren't doing so hot-- look what Hasbro did with GIJOE. "The Rise of Cobra" didn't perform as well as they wanted, both in terms of box office receipts and toy sales, so they're trying a different direction with "Retaliation" by bringing in a largely new cast, setting a new tone, etc. If "The Rise of Cobra" had been a box office smash, they wouldn't have needed to do that.

[Alak]

I dunno about that. Those kinds of scenes would involve more close-up stuff, more subtle movement of parts that ILM wouldn't really need to worry about in action scenes where the camera is panned out more. Of course, said action sequences also would involve more TFs in one shot (usually) and shrapnel etc. calculcations, like you said... I guess I'll defer to your media design expertise on this matter I suppose, but I have my doubts it would be THAT much less time-consuming.

What's actually pretty cool about rendering is that everything's done at high resolution. Images you see on the web are typically at 72 dps. Real life movie posters, banners, etc. are usually done at 300 dps so that you can shrink and blow them up without losing resolution. Now, I don't know what ILM does because I don't work there, so take this next part with a grain of salt. Typical CGI renderings are done at 1000 dps in order to give them the maximum amount of detail in order to sell realism to the audience. I'm going to assume that ILM uses the same resolution for their Transformers models. This means that they can zoom in for close-ups without losing image quality. The really awesome thing about close-ups is that you have less background in the picture, meaning you don't have to render the picture as much as a wide-shot picture. Once models are made and skinned, they're finished. Render processes involve blending them into the environment so we believe that they are there. If I were to use a close up of Optimus, I'd actually be doing less work than if I were to be rendering him in a melee engagement. How much time is saved? It honestly depends on the artists so there's no way I can definitively give you an answer on that.

Your opinion. I think it makes them look considerably more believable in a real-life setting. In comics and cartoons you can get away with "bendy metal" faces, small parts colliding with each other, and all that, but not in CGI methinks. Regardless, that was actually not a call by Michael Bay. He didn't have much of anything to do with the Transformers movie design aesthetic-- that was all Hasbro.

You know what, you're actually right it wasn't Bay, but it was Orci (the writer) who made that call. Bay only picked the models that ILM pitched to the crew.

No, I understand that. Hence the "padding out" with human characters and whatnot I mentioned; it'd be too expensive to have the TFs on the screen all the time, which is sort of a response to the "not enough TFs in Transformers" argument. But the movie revolves around the Transformers-- completely CGI chars-- while incorporating a real-world setting (i.e, not green screen) to an extent that no other movie does.

Hence, why I made out a plan on how to save money on some parts of the film-making process and redirecting the funds to compensate for the extra dosage of CGI. It's all about budgeting in this business. Notice how movies that drop a significant portion of its budget into the director and actors' laps tend to do more poorly with audiences and critics. It's not going to be more expensive to have transformer leads because you won't be spending more than the limit that Paramount sets for you. Suppose I write an essay that has an exact word limit. The essay sucks, so what I do is I cut out the disposable portions that make it suck and add more to the segments that are good. At the end of the day, I'm still going to use the same amount of words but I'll have a significantly improved essay. Yes, I understand this is a highly simplified example, but it's an analogy that works. The movie industry is a business, and that's how businesses think to better themselves.

First off, I want to make something clear here-- I'm not "accepting" your premise that the Transformers movies are bad. Could they be better? In some (IMO) minor areas, yes. But I still love and enjoy all three of them, DOTM far and away the most. I don't think there's a whole lot that necessarily needs fixing, I quite enjoy them. I was merely pointing out the constraints on the director et al. are under and tempering expectations accordingly.
But I think the larger and more important point here is that, from the POV of all the parties involved in making the movie, there is nothing that needs fixing. You can give different ideas about how to change the direction until the cows come home, but the fact is you don't know it would be successful any more than many Transfans in 2007 "knew" the first TF live action movie would bomb. You may know that YOU would like it more, but you don't know it would be successful. No director is bomb-proof.
But Hasbro, Paramount, and GM have a really extraordinary thing going here. The first movie far surpassed their expectations in terms of sales and box office returns, and each movie in the trilogy has outperformed the last. Obviously things can't continue to improve monetarily at quite this pace given how ridiculously well DOTM did (4th-highest worldwide gross of all time, not factoring in inflation), but the point is, WHY would they change anything? Hasbro's making loads of money off the toys, Paramount's making loads of money off the movies, GM and the other car companies involved get great product placement with a director who is experienced with shooting cars with just the right angle and lighting, and as said before, can do things under a strict timetable and at/under budget. As a business, you take risks and go in a new direction when your current direction is failing, NOT when it's doing as astoundingly well as the Bay movies have been doing. I mean, you simply can't do much better than DOTM in terms of sales. To change direction at this point in time would be antithetical to Hasbro's purpose with these movies. Why do you think they threw so much money at Bay for TF3 and now TF4? Bay at first wanted to take a break after TF2 like he's doing now and work on another movie before returning, so they must've offered him a heckuva lot of money to get him to go straight to TF3. And given that he swore up and down he was done with the franchise after TF3, they must've offered him even MORE for TF4. Why? Because you don't change direction at the top of your game unless there's no other choice, and Hasbro and Paramount know that. You go with more of the same.
You only take risks when things aren't doing so hot-- look what Hasbro did with GIJOE. "The Rise of Cobra" didn't perform as well as they wanted, both in terms of box office receipts and toy sales, so they're trying a different direction with "Retaliation" by bringing in a largely new cast, setting a new tone, etc. If "The Rise of Cobra" had been a box office smash, they wouldn't have needed to do that.

I understand where you're coming from, but that mindset is no longer applicable to the new Transformers movies. As I said before, I will always give props to Michael Bay for taking the first attempt at a live-action Transformers movie. I enjoyed 2/3 of the movies even though I recognize that they're bad from a technical standpoint. The whole "risk" argument works... if we're having this discussion in 2007. The problem here is that this is 2012. We've already had a live-action trilogy. We already know how the CGI process works. We already know that if you put transforming robots on screen, people will flock to the movies and Paramount will make money. The fact that Paramount has an incredible promotion team tells us that the financial success of Transformers was due to hype than to people actually liking the movie. I've said that these movies were badly written/directed, but even when I watch those trailers/commercials today I can't help but get chills running up and down my spine! That's the hype factor for you. Despite the financial success, we still can't deny the trend here:

Transformers

Critics who liked it: 57%
Audiences who liked it: 89%

Revenge of the Fallen

Critics who liked it: 26%
Audiences who liked it: 76%

Dark of the Moon

Critics who liked it: 35%
Audiences who liked it: 67%

Just look at the audience trend and you can see that it's going down. Movie studios don't care about reviews, so if they see money they'll milk the franchise until it dies. Just watch, the numbers will continue to plummet and people will increasingly acknowledge that the movies aren't good aside from the fights. There is no risk if we reboot the franchise! If anything, Paramount and Hasbro have only everything to gain from this. Regardless who's the actor/director and regardless of the quality, the movie will make a lot of money. That is irrefutable fact because we have 3 movies to prove it. Commercialism, pre-existing fanbase, and promotions are responsible for this, and we know this is fact due to low scoring movies doing well in the box office (Transformers, Last Airbender, The Phantom Menace, etc.). We have a money-making franchise that suffers from poor critical reception. How do we fix this? Replace the people making the movie with those who can make a better movie. This is so logically sound that it's honestly shocking as to why Paramount didn't do this after DOTM. You can bring up the $$$ argument again, but I already refuted it with a proper budgeting foundation. Seriously though, franchises that are financially successful (but suck) that are rebooted with better directors have been proven to generate at least as much money while receiving better critical acclaim. Examples:

- The Schumacher Batman films were a box office hit despite sucking so hard. Nolan had the same budget (if you do your inflation calculations) and made an infinitely better Batman movie that was also a #1 box office hit.
- Ang Lee's The Hulk was ranked as one of the top opening box office hits of all time despite negative reviews. Leterrier made a new one years later with a similar budget that garnered positive reviews and was #1 at the box office while staying strong, unlike its predecessor.
- Pierce Brosman's James Bond series was one of the more financially successful films of the franchise, but they got mixed reviews. Enter the new Casino Royale that was hailed by critics and audiences alike while earning the title as the #1 grossing James Bond film ever.
- While the X-Men movies were far from bad, the 3rd movie clearly took a turn for the worse (and don't get me started on Wolverine). First Class came out which not only was a critical hit, but it made more money than the original X-Men film.
- Another current example that we don't have figures for is the new Amazing Spider-man movie. After the disaster that was Spider-man 3, we have an immediate reboot on our hands this summer. Despite initial naysayers, the number of hits on Youtube (and likes/favorites) indicates that this new trilogy will be just as successful as the previous one.

The concept of rebooting a successful yet sucky franchise isn't foreign to us. We already know it's worked in the past, therefore, we have precedence that a reboot for Transformers is only beneficial for Paramount and Hasbro. I'll go ahead an repeat myself in case it was missed before: it will be financially successful regardless of who directs the movie. It will be successful regardless who writes the script. It will be successful regardless who plays the human actors. So, why aren't we allowed to have movie that is both financially AND critically successful. The majority of posters on this forum alone don't like the Bayformers, but we still went to go watch them in theaters. Whether it's Bay or someone far better, I'll still go see the movie. The question is: will I like it after fridge logic kicks in?


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On another note, I just thought of Peter Jackson as a viable candidate. Not because of LOTR, but because of King Kong. I don't care what people may assume, but rendering a hairy animal (even a small one) is so much harder than rendering an entire transformer. If I worked for ILM, I'd be all for doing Transformers because grunge, dirt, robots, etc. aren't as bad as people make them out to be (not saying it's easy, though ). If I had to work on King Kong, a giant hairy gorilla would be mindblowing painful to render. So hard that I'm confident Jackson's crew was breathing a sigh of relief knowing that they killed Kong off to prevent a possible sequel. You don't make a model with flowing hair, you actually have to render each individual follicle movement for every freakin' frame. No wonder King Kong exceeded its budget by $50 million, but Jackson convinced Universal that a $150 million budget was too small. I absolutely believe him because I can't even fathom how many terrabytes your farm would have to sustain just to shoot a single action scene with King Kong!!!

Now, imagine this: give Peter Jackson the same $200 million budget that Bay had for ROTF. Let him hire his usual dark horse actors and utilize his experience from using CGI lead characters in a real world environment. We know that he's capable of making absurdly epic trilogies that destroy box office records. We know he can write a story that will move us to tears. Transformers fanbase + Peter Jackson fanbase = instant record setting movie. You know, forget what I said about Spielberg, Abrams, and all of those other guys. Peter Jackson is now my #1 favorite for rebooting the Transformers live-action franchise. Make it happen!

[Phoenix]

Since you two have made most of the arguments for and against the Bay-verse, I just want to chip in with one thing.. Why don't we have a "LIKE!" button for posts we agree wholeheartedly with?? I'd very much like to stamp my approval on Alak's detailed arguments here.

On a personal level I wasn't crazy about any of the Bay tf movies. If I was to rate them, I would probably have rated #1 with around 75%, #2 with 60%, and the final one with a painful 40% since I spent most of the movie wishing it would end.. I went to see them due to having liked tfs growing up, but after the travesty that was the third movie I don't think I'll bother wasting my money on another episode in the socalled Bay saga..