It's popular to blame on Bay, but as much as I dislike his movies I don't think he is entirely to blame for TLK bombing at the box office. The previous movies made money, we can't deny that. Is it franchise fatigue? The writers room? Too much competition in the summer periode or do mainstream audience finally listens to the critics?

 

1. Lorenzo
2. Writer's room; seems like they didn't understand the Transformers lore from the previous films
3. Competition; opened in a month where Wonder Woman was slaying and 2 weeks before Spider-Man.
4. Franchise fatigue; these movies have become predictable if you think about it and 4 straight movies that were panned by critics
5. The editing room; I have no idea what the fuck they did in the editing room cause my god that was terrible
These are my reasons why the movie failed in box office and critically.

 

The producers, writers and director who all ignored what has made this franchise appealing for over 30 years, and instead chose to give us five terrible films that have little focus on the Transformers, except for when killing them off.

 

OK, Dmhead.... Since you've got nothing better to do on this site, let's hit this on the nail.

1. If you seen any Bay movie, generally speaking he always improvises what is on paper. So as much as I don't hate him because he can make good movies (e.g. The Rock, 13 Hours etc), he has a tendency to move a little too far from the script and change the dialogue a little. He also is responsible for some of the production choices, like he must of spent so much money on global trotting, hiring comedic extras or explosions that it takes away from what should be the focus. I would give 20% blame here.

2. The producers. Who is the one doing most of the talk? Yeah... Lorenzo. If it is truly to believed that the humans are of central importance in the movie universe, then blame him for not trying to move on and be more innovative. 20% there.

3. Writers. Akiva Goldsman hasn't written anything I consider good since 'A Beautiful Mind'? Anyway... Seems to me, there might have been good ideas but studios exec decide. 'Why don't we put all of this together?' And that moment signifies a huge concern. What's on paper might not be bad, it really all depends on how you direct it. So yeah.... 20%?

4. Franchise fatigue. What do you expect after not putting a new vision behind the camera? There's also tonal inconsistencies. 20 % here

5. Co-operate decision making. 20% again. You know what this means right?

And when the Bumblebee movie comes, you're gonna be asking more redundant questions when really you can decide for yourself instead of asking other people. I can't be bothered writing a straight answer to this question because of how redundant it is when there is another thread for box office and stuff.

 

Yeah, sounds about right to me.

And things sounds like they aren't any better for the BB film. I mean, come on, John Cena? Dude's a memetic joke and he's no Dwayne Johnson. Even the cheesy Expendables 2 understood how to not abuse a living meme when Chuck Norris did little more than blow up a tank simply by showing up. But Cena? His biggest claim to fame was a radio show prank he had nothing to do with besides be some random wrestler!

 

I love Bay... but I gotta pin blame on him

 

Can we stop making these threads every three days? Seriously.

 

Plenty of blame to go around.

The movie business has changed but Bay, the producers, Paramount, just way too many involved that haven't adapted to change so they thought they could do the same things forever and it would never flop. I think the people involved might have even bought into the hype that the movies really were critic proof not knowing that a place like Rotten Tomatoes can sink movies these days.

I think a good deal of blame has to go to Paramount. Just look at their sorry domestic track record in recent years. Instead of turning around their domestic numbers it's almost as if they said screw domestic ticket buyers the Chinese ticket buyers will bail us out each and every time. Transformers the Last Knight is one in a string of recent Paramount films that did poorly at the box office compared to their production costs. The studio just seems to be completely out of touch with what people want.

You could also blame other studios learned from their mistakes so there were better options out there if you aren't the sort of person that goes to the movies every week. Warner Brothers drop a metric ton of the stuff people didn't like about Batman v Superman or Suicide Squad to make a Wonder Woman movie people went crazy for. Sony learned from the mistakes of the Amazing Spider Man movies and even went so far as to team up with Marvel/Disney in Sony's quest of anything to fix Spider Man. Watch a Transformers movie just like all the other Transformers movies or watch a Wonder Woman movie that's different than the rest of the DCEU?

Plus TV doesn't stop in summer any more. Streaming services are offering up new shows in the summer so they can take advantage of summer break that the old networks take in the summer. I've heard more people buzzing about things like GLOW on Netflix than I have heard people buzzing about movies. Some The Last Knight trailers looked like a Game of Thrones rip off but why watch the rip off when the real Game of Thrones had new episodes in July?

 

If you wanna be technical, the reason it flopped is because people didn't buy enough tickets.

Now if you wanna know why it's a bad movie, that's another story.

 

For me it was mostly the editting.

 

Everyone.

But mostly Bay.

 

Not so much franchise fatigue as it is people's fatigue from bad, inconsistent, incoherent story; juvenile jokes; confusing plot points; too much focus on the human drama.

I don't think it's franchise fatigue. Transformers literally has tons of source material that could be utilized to create a great story and make the live action movies maintain its interest to the public.

It's like the Terminator franchise. It's not that people don't like the franchise. It's, after Terminator 3, it's the un-inspiring, un-imaginative stories that were told that keep using the same old tropes and themes from previous movies instead of making their planned new trilogy a hardcore war/post-apocalyptic movie.

 

The way I see it is this:

The first 2007 movie was really good and it created goodwill capital for the transformers live action movies that translated to box office success.

This goodwill capital was carried over to ROTF and that was a box office success, even when critically and story-wise they were bad. But some of that goodwill capital from the first movies was spent.

DotM this was when the goodwill capital starts to unravel as there really were not any improvements to the overall story and inconsistent and incoherent plot points still plague the movies.

AoE literally used china but at this point domestic take was already going downhill.

By the time TLK was released all that goodwill generated by the first movie was gone, and the movie is still riddled with so much inconsistency and incoherence that word of mouth was not going to save it, and neither would china.

So the solution: start fresh and create a goodwill capital again and the best way to prevent the movies bombing is to keep and maintain that capital by delivering a smooth, organized, well-planned narrative and plot.

 

I'd say editing room has big role in it also Michael Bay and Lorenzo to some degree.

 

The main reason for me, is that the Transformer films of late, have not tried to push boundaries in doing something novel, unique or fresh.

They keep going back to formulaic stuff.

 

Bay created the Transformers movie paradigm that set us on the downward spiral from the start.

 

Honestly, I don't think The Last Knight was that bad. The threat of Cybertron had a constant presence in the story, we had some character for the Decepticons, there was little to no filler, and honestly, it was the least offensive movie to date. The problem, I think, comes from franchise fatigue. For all it's strengths, TLK is still too similar story-wise to its predecessors. A Cybertronian MacGuffin is hidden on Earth and has led to the presence of Transformers on Earth for a long time, a lot of action scenes happen, there's a human romance somewhere in there, and the main bad guy is seemingly destroyed. After four movies where the plot is largely unchanged, I don't think anyone can be blamed for not wanting to see the fifth movie, no matter how good it is, or even for seeing it and not liking it.

 

As bad as the editing was it sounds like they did the best they could with what they had in a very short amount of time. Bay filmed way too much and probably did it up until the last possible minute. I believe I read that Lorenzo is the one responsible for taking multiple pitched storylines and cramming them into one movie (just like AOE) and I think that's where the problems began.

 

I'm not sure that people are tied of Transformers, just that they are tired of watching the same Transformers doing the same thing over and over.

For years now we have been hearing about the end of the superhero boom. Yet we are still seeing superheroes rule the box office. I think in part this is because every superhero movie isn't exactly the same. Maybe the Avengers had to save the entire world last film but Spider Man can be focused on stopping one group of criminals from spreading high tech weapons. If the Avengers fail it's the end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, if Spider Man failed it would have been bad but not the end of the world. Wonder Woman had a costume, Logan didn't but both films did well at the box office. We even get a mix of ratings so you could have a PG-13 superhero movie or a rated R superhero movie.

 

biggest culprit, in my opinion, was forcing an extended universe down our throats at film 5....bay & kruger weren't the best but they had a good thing going, a profitable thing going & they decided to blow that up & bring in new people & it was very, very evident, sadly.