The 7th entry in an exhausted saga ends up as its lowest-grossing ever, great news for the crossover with an IP boasting a 100% failure rate

It’s been obvious to everybody except Paramount that audiences lost interest in the Transformers franchise almost a decade ago when Michael Bay’s Age of Extinction became the saga’s second consecutive billion-dollar hit.

Earnings dropped by over $500 million by the time The Last Knight rolled around, before they dipped again despite Bumblebee scoring better reviews than Bay’s final four features combined. Refusing to learn its lesson, this year’s Rise of the Beasts was dubbed the start of an entire trilogy, only to leave theaters by setting another record low for the exhausted saga of Autobots and Decepticons.

With $436 million in the tank, Steven Caple Jr. at least managed to avoid delivering an out-and-out bomb, although you’ve got to wonder why the decision was made to set up a crossover with another Hasbro/Paramount property that currently boasts a zero-for-three track record.

Rise of Cobra, Retaliation, and Snake Eyes all under-performed to varying degrees, and having conspired to make the last three Transformers films each assume control of the “lowest-earning” tag, crossing the latter over with G.I. Joe surely seems doomed to fail unless there’s some sort of divine intervention from the gods of cinema.

We’ve already had 10 of these damned things separately, and the evidence is there for all to see that nobody cares anymore, and yet neither franchise is anywhere close to being over. We’ll just have to wait for Transformers/G.I. Joe to arrive and be ignored, then, because apparently nobody got the memo that smashing two flagging brands together isn’t the smartest move to try and revive their flailing individual or collective fortunes.