Michael Bay spent a decade at the helm of the Transformers franchise, and while his five movies earned over $4 billion at the box office, the general consensus is that they were largely awful. The first installment is regarded as the high point, and even that wasn’t exactly universally beloved, with reviews getting progressively worse for each new entry until the half-billion dollar drop off in revenue that greeted The Last Knight made it abundantly clear that audiences had lost interest in these incomprehensible assaults on the senses.
Ironically, the first Transformers movie without Bay behind the camera turned out to be the best one yet by a country mile, but Bumblebee still ended up as the lowest-grossing adventure for the Autobots yet. Just a few years ago, Paramount had assembled no less than twelve writers to work on their proposed cinematic universe, but the law of diminishing returns has now seen the studio decide to reboot the franchise from the ground up.
There are already numerous Transformers projects in the works, including a Bumblebee sequel, a Beast Wars adaptation, a new live-action movie that will ignore the continuity of Bay’s output and a feature-length animation from Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley. And we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us Extraction is getting a sequel and that Transformers was being rebooted months before it was announced – that the orchestrator of big screen Bayhem reportedly wants back in.
From what we understand, Bay has the itch to play in the Transformers sandbox again and has already spoken to both the higher-ups at Paramount and the franchise’s producers about possibly directing the planned Bumblebee 3. Nothing is set in stone just yet and they’ve only had talks at this stage, but he’s apparently eager to return.
Of course, this might not be the greatest move for the Transformers. Bay’s movies may have done big business, sure, but it isn’t a coincidence that the first one he wasn’t responsible for turned out to be the best one yet. Then again, the producers have already admitted that Bumblebee 2 will have some more Bayhem in it, so perhaps they might be willing to bring the director back again if he could reign it in a bit and stick to closer to the more grounded tone that the series has now set out for itself.
