While Michael Bay delivered some true blockbuster spectacles with his Transformers franchise, in 2017 even the master of hollow bombast floundered with what became his final entry in the franchise, Transformers: The Last Knight. While the franchise was rebooted with the massively successful Bumblebee, and continued with Rise of the Beasts, the original Bay saga died after its fifth entry suffered from its mega budget and which reportedly lost Paramount around $100 million. Now, the panned blockbuster that killed Bay’s directorial efforts in the Transformers universe is heading to streaming on its new home on 
Prime Video in December.
Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise blasted onto screens in 2007, bringing the robots in disguise to life in a way that only several years earlier seemed impossible. Helped along by stars Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, the movie was panned by critics but soared at the box office, turning a $708 million haul from its $151 million budget. This kicked off a run of increasingly profitable movies with Revenge of the Fallen, Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction leading to box office billions and a blank check for Bay to continue the franchise with The Last Knight…which is where things went wrong.
The Last Knight starred Mark Wahlberg and continued to expand the Transformers story with the usual mix of weak plotting designed to get to the next spectacular set piece in record time. For that reason, reviews from critics were brutal, giving the movie just a 16% score, while audiences were not much happier with the film, leading to a divisive 46% Popcornmeter rating. The synopsis for the movie reads:
“Humans are at war with the Transformers, and Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving the future lies buried in the secrets of the past and the hidden history of Transformers on Earth. Now, it’s up to the unlikely alliance of inventor Cade Yeager, Bumblebee, an English lord and an Oxford professor to save the world.”
The movie’s biggest issue was that it saw Bay’s production costs rise to the highest of the franchise at $217 million, so when the film powered down out of theaters with just a $602 million worldwide gross, Bay’s time at the franchise ended and the Transformers saga was completely rebooted and overhauled with Bumblebee, a movie that cost half as much as most of Bay’s movies but looked just as impressive. However, both Bumblebee and Rise of the Beasts – which once again saw the budget jump to almost $200 million – failed to break $500 million at the box office, suggesting that perhaps Michael Bay’s decade of churning out Transformers movies has perhaps put the franchise beyond saving.
What’s Next for ‘Transformers’?
After the release of Bumblebee in 2018, there was a lot of uncertainty about the Transformers franchise, but in 2023, Rise of the Beasts seemed to be kick-starting the franchise again. However, the film struggled in a post-pandemic world, like so many other big franchise movies of that year. In 2024, the Transformers returned with the animated movie, Transformers One, which, as you would expect, had a substantially smaller budget of $75 million, but made just $128 million – another borderline failure based on box office numbers alone.
At the end of Rise of the Beasts, a post-credits scene unexpectedly teased a crossover with another popular toy line: GI Joe. It was suggested at the time that a mashup movie would be heading into production with Chris Hemsworth set to join the franchise. However, there has been no update on this movie in almost two years, and a recent announcement has now put the chances of the film ever happening in doubt.
In October, it was revealed that a crossover of Transformers and GI Joe is finally moving forward – as an animated series. While this is not exactly what fans had been expecting, it has been announced that the show will not be aimed at younger audiences, but will instead aim to be more “adult-skewing,” and will be based on the Energon Universe publishing initiative that brought together the two IPs along with original title Void Rivals with a teenage-adult market in mind in 2023. There is no date set for the show’s release, and, in the meantime, fans will still be hoping that a live-action crossover movie could still happen.
- Release Date
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June 21, 2017
- Runtime
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149 minutes
- Producers
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Don Murphy, Ian Bryce, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Tom DeSanto