Avatar cost $237 million to make in 2009. With inflation, that would cost $270 million today. I don't think any studio is gonna want to spend that much.

TLK's budget was $216 million. And that was pushing it.

 

Well, they're not going to raise the budget now that the movies have started losing money. I guarantee the 2018 and 2019 films will have lower budgets than TLK. Possibly significantly lower, depending on where TLK ends up.

 

Then like I said, surely eliminating Hopkins, Wahlberg, Duhmel, etc. would have aided in that department.

There are plenty of ways around it. Enough with the excuses. Whether it's shelling out the money, eliminating the higher priced cast, making the robots a little simpler, getting a better younger director, etc.. there are better ways to do a transformers movie that won't turn out like garbage.

 

The way TLK has performed, I'd be shocked if there was a movie in 2018 or 2019. If it were me, I'd push the Bumblebee movie back to the 2019 date to give it an extra year of development. They supposedly are gonna start filming in August which would give them less than a year to complete the movie. That's crazy. Push it back a year and get it right. Then if it does well, you can start thinking about Transformers 6 or a reboot.

 

Has there been a major blockbuster in which a human wasn't the lead character? Even Avatar is about a human.

Star Wars, a universe filled with aliens and robots and the humans are always the lead.

I'm willing to bet audiences require humans as the central point of any story to truly connect to it.

These movies aren't successful because of the people who spend their time obsessing about the robots via their toys.

 

The rebooted Planet of the Apes Trilogy has proven this theory wrong. If you spend time developing your characters, treating them as real and relatable individuals with proper motivations, the audience will be willing to follow them on their journey however absurd the premise might be.

 

On the contrary. If it weren't for the ILM CGI, and being based on a gigantic long-running franchise, I doubt the first movie would have gone far, let alone the sequels.

It sure as hell wasn't the prospect of getting to listen to Shia Labeouf scream that kept people coming.

 

It's not the budget that is the problem, it's the way the money is used to render the robots. I mean like, do we need the scene where the worm thing eat an entire building in DOTM? Or the scene where Devastator did nothing beside eating up sands? Or the scene where Lockdown's ship sucking up buildings and ships? How much do those scenes costs? The budget that costs to render those pointless scenes could be used to render the transformers, but instead the budget is used on useless gimmicks.

A lot of easy tricks can be used to increase the robots screentime, like having the transformers talking in their vehicle mode (Like in the majority of TF medias) or simplify the robot design to make rendering easier. So I don't see why make the robots has more screentime is impossible to be done.

I would be fine with lack of robot screentime if the human characters are well-written, but the thing is they aren't good characters. The transformers themselves aren't that much better as characters anyway.

 

that has zero to do with the assertion that the majority of the audience are people who do not obsess over or even buy the toys.

 

not a bad call but I'd still say the humans are the main characters of the first two movies.

 

Don't have it 90% transformers. But do have it maybe 60/40 in transformers favor. Some cool vehicle scenes work for me as well. Hire less known actors for cheaper to save on budget. Don't have massive transformers or CGI ships. Just have the Dino bots/autobots and the cons

 

I'm not saying the movies couldn't work with robots being the main focus, but the question is will the audience connect to that more than a story about a boy whose first car turns out to be an alien robot?

 

Wall-E

Gromit (of Wallace and Gromit fame)

Shrek

The Minions (this movie made more money than most Transformers films so it counts)

etc.

Avatar is basically sci-fi cat smurf Pocohantas. The actual narrative being told isn't that new there.

That's partly because back in the 70s having leading characters be humans would be difficult and the franchise has been forced to stick to that.

In GOTG if we're honest, 99% of the entire film has Peter Quill as literally the only human in the narrative. Everybody else are space aliens who are human-like.

There is a threshold of how far a thing can be inhuman and audiences can still understand it. The issue isn't needing humans outright, but it's making the alien robots more human. Show how similar their lives and culture are to humanity, yet different. The entire reason Prime had his faceplate removed for when he talks is so his face is more human like, while the Decepticons are supposed to be more non-human built and thus scarier and more evil looking.[/QUOTE]

 

IIRC, the CGI is only expensive in the initial design. Once they have the models built, animating them into scenes is much cheaper.

 

And you're right, but from what I've seen damn near everyone who speaks about these movies, lover/hater/toy-buyer/general audience, all include some variation on "I wish the movies focused more on the Transformers". It's not like everyone loved Sam except for toy collectors. Despite being the main draw, They're side characters in all 5 films. Except maybe Optimus and Bumblebee. the latter of which is barely a character to begin with, but that's a different issue.

It doesn't help that the characters are pretty terrible by themselves, even if you try to care about them. They bring back Lennox and he's a damn fool who's talked into making deals with Megatron and hunting down Autobots because "he's acting covertly". They dropped Sam, who the first 3 films spent hours on, and it's such a non-issue he's not even mentioned. Tessa and her boyfriend were a complete waste of time who don't even return for the next one, outside a voice cameo. The movie themselves don't really care about these characters, they just have to do something to fill in the chunks of screentime between transformer appearances.

As i mentioned before, I think a lot of the issue is that Bay has never really wanted to direct a Transformers movie.

 

How is Bumblebee "barely a character"?

 

I thought the 1st & 3rd acts of TLK had a great (near perfect)mix of human/robot screentime.

It's that damn Da Vincci code 2nd act of the film where the human-robot ratio went completely out of wack. The only Bot you get in that section is Cogman.

 

After 5 movies, what have we learned about him? What is he like as a character? All I've got is, he's clumsy, likes to hang around humans and gets offended easily. As questionable as it is, at least Optimus is given some development. Bee is completely shallow.

He's not really any more relevant than the other Autobots, he's just there because Hasbro loves Bee and wants to keep cranking out his toys. He could have been killed off between DOTM -AOE, and replaced with another character, and it would not have affected AOE at all.

 

I mean the movies have made optumis more of an evil ass then megatron. So it for the best this series gets rebooted with more transfromers time.

 

Do you really think we are talking about children's cartoons? Bambi doesn't dispute my argument.

Petet Quill may be the only human character, but he's the main character. You are only proving my point. There's a very deliberate reason why the movie didn't start with rocket racoon.