No, I’m good thanks. He got five goes with it and a strike rate of 2 good to 3 shit movies would not inspire confidence.

 

Actually the movies weren't needed to bring Transformers to a modern age because they already had been brought to the modern age before the first movie even came out. You talk about it like there are only two incarnations of Transformers G1 and live action. But there was also Beast Wars, Beast Machines, RID2001, Armada, Energon, and Cybertron before the first movie even came out. There's also been Animated, Prime, RID2015, and Rescue Bots between films that have all done much better jobs at reimagining Transformers in the modern age than the movies. Prime even had the same writers as the movies but none of Bay's influence.

As for the money if you actually look each film has brought in less money than the previous installment. The first movie made the most money as most of the audience didn't realize how terrible it was going to be. With each sequel many fans have jumped ship not carrying about seeing this shit show continue. In short the movies are losing more viewers than they gained.

You are a minority. You even admitted that yourself in the first post. It's not much of a defence to say you wouldn't care about Transformers if the movies didn't exist when you're outnumbered by fans who would still be here if the movies existed or not. Just because you like them doesn't make them good movies.

Even if I wasn't a fan of older shows these movies are terrible. I'm generally pretty good at taking off my nostalgia googles and judging something on it's own from the perspective of the general audience... it probably helps that I often have the opions of non-fans to draw from. That said...

The Transformers are barely even characters in their own movies. Other than Optimus Prime or Bumblebee most of the audience who aren't toy collectors and don't post on forums like this don't even know the characters names because the movies never take the time to develop them as real characters. The only people who actually care about Jazz's death in the first movie are fans of the G1 character who keep confusing him for his G1 counterpart. If you actually look at Bay Jazz as a different character with no preconcieved notions about who he is, then his death means nothing because he was barely on screen.

Ratchet despite being in four movies never did anything memorable as a character. He was just kinda there. Animated and Prime had more character development in a single episode than the movie version did across four films. G1 Ratchet wasn't really developed well either but G1 also had a humoungus cast and not enough time to develop every character properly. The movies don't have that excuse especially the first movie which only had five Autobots. They chose to keep the focus on Bumblebee which left the rest of the cast feeling more like set pieces than actual characters.

I could forgive the crappy designs if the writing was any good. In fact Beast Machines is one of my favorite shows despite the designs of the Maximals being terrible. Optimus in that series was even worse than the movie versions. Like wise making them look better won't make any difference if the story is terrible, example being I actually hate Armada more than the live action films.

The only good thing the films really have going for them is if you aren't comparing the designs to other iterations of the characters, they are visually fun to look at. It's like watching a fire works display, but a movie has to do something more than look good... and I personally think the only reason anyone thinks these look good is because you guys are the ones looking at them with nostalgia googles. For you these are your first introduction to the franchise so the cartoons you just lack the imagination to see what they could look like in live action. We see them that way more easily because we've imagined them in live action for years before there ever was a movie.

I would seriously recommend watching Beast Wars. Don't look at it from a visual perspective cause that show has not aged well, the CGI looks like crap. Just watch it from a story perspective. Pay attention to character development and plot, two things the live action films are seriously lacking. Then maybe you'll understand why so many people hate what Bay has done with this franchise.

 

Beast wars was good

Every thing after that tanked comericaly and criticaly, to day that the movies didnt revitaliz the franchise is ignorance in history.

Also yeah a full 25 episode runnhar more character then a 2-3 hour movie, innthencartoon ratchet might of been a full charactee, but in a movie with budget time we dont have the cash to make sure the c listers get long backstories

If were gonna use a tire marvel cliche ratches like mantis in infinity war.

 

Funny you make that comparison when even Mantis has more character development in one movie than Ratchet had in four.

Granted she didn't do much in Infinity War but her character was introduced in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Infinity War has a butt load of heroes in it so of course that movie can't devote screen time to all of them. Transformers only had five Autobots, they have no excuse for cutting screen time.

Oh and if you're going to blame the CGI budget, it probably wouldn't be so high if the transformations were simplified and made more solid looking instead of having thousands of moving parts to them. Just another reason to hate the overly complex designs.

And finally I specifically said A SINGLE EPISODE had more character development than FOUR movies. You just delibratly changed it to 25 episodes vs a single movie which is not even close to the argument I actually made. Your counter argument isn't even valid if you have to change what I actually said to make it work.

 

Respectfully Sir

 

Michael Bay is legitimately the problem. After the first movie they would write plots and scripts. And then once filming started Bay would tear up the script, and write a new one incorporating what he liked out of all of them. The result was a series of frankenstein's monsters movies that had to be partially constructed in the editing room.

It's no coincidience the first Transformers movie worked the best because it is perhaps the only one where Bay didn't entirely improv the movie he was filming from various scripts he had, as he was filming it.

I can't think of a single, other major movie that was made like that. A common thing written here is "I wish Transformers movies could be done like Marvel Studios does Marvel movies". The secret sauce really is, Marvel hires good writers for their movies and their directors don't usually rip up the script when filming.

 

In defense of Bay over Lee, he pays his employees.

(Also- the Waid Daredevil run is really critically acclaimed and did great, the Archie run fairly well thought of... haven't read his Cap run, but still, odd examples)

 

Not in 1000 years.

 

You're being generous.

 

WHOA. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. You argued earlier that Bay was still producing Bumblebee and therefore it was still his, now your saying he doesn't have that much control. Which is it?

 

I wouldn't go that far. Sure other Transformers fans would still be here if the movies existed or not and you may only be here because of the movies but I hate the mentality of "you're not a real fan if you don't agree with me". I'm only trying to point out that movieverse fans are a minority in this fandom not. Never intended to make you feel like you're not a Transformers fan if you only like the movies. It's still a part of Transformers regardless of my opinions we may be different types of Transformers fans with different opinions but you are as much a fan as any of us. There is no such thing as a "real fan".

That said I'm judging the movies based on the criteria of story, plot, character development, and how it compares with other Transformers as well as just comparing with other movies. Not by how many new fans it brought in.

There also isn't really a good way of judging the movies by number of fans as there isn't really a good source comparing the number of fans gained to the number of fans lost because of the movies. I can only really come to a rough estimate based on the declining budget for each sequel and that's telling me that a lot more people hated the movies than liked them. I still think the first movie made the most money and had the highest budget not because it was actually good but because at that time the audience really didn't know what to expect. Even though a lot of people hated the designs from the moment we first saw them we were still willing to give it a chance because character design isn't always an indicator that the story will be bad.

More and more people seem to jump ship with each sequel and I really don't know why I've hung on for so long. At this point I know what to expect and even though the bar isn't set nearly as high as it was for the first film I still end up disappointed. It's gotten to a point where even though Bay is gone I'm not expecting anything that even remotely resembles that universe to be any good. Part of me wants to give the new Bumblebee movie a chance because we actually got a different director for once, but it looks like it's still set in Bay's universe as a prequel. They really need to do a full on hard reboot of the films to actually get me interested again. This soft reboot crap isn't cutting it.

Bayformers to me is the Batman and Robin or Spider-man 3 of the franchise except Paramount for whatever reason keeps making more sequels rather than bringing us our Christopher Nolan trilogy or Amazing Spider-man.

At best what we're getting is the Days of Future Past to X-Mex and that's not good enough. Except for Dead pool I don't even pay attention to the X-Men universe anymore because they're attempt to fix the issues has actually created more problems than it solved. The only reason I think Dead pool works is because of his ability to break the 4th wall and openly mock how confusing the time line is. The universe doesn't always have to make sense when you're dealing with a character who knows he's a fictional character in a universe that doesn't make sense. I can just sit back and enjoy the humor without trying too hard to think about things like how the end credits scene from Dead pool 2 basically undid the entire movie. It doesn't really matter that much cause the character is more about the humor than following a logical time line.

Bumblebee I suspect is going to be similar to X-Men Origins Wolverine.

 

Nope, he can f*ck off after TLK, enough is enough.

 

I love the Bay movies, was a Bay fan before I even dreamed he’d work on transformers. But even I can admit he stayed for one movie too long. Which is easy to say in hindsight at the time Paramount, and Hasbro were offering him an amazing deal. Do a TF movie every few years, which he admits he has great fun making them, and he also got to work on his two passion projects Pain and Gain, and 13 hours.

It was a good run 10 years of world wide mainstream success, but things always have to change eventually, and he’ll always be on hand as a producer. The good thing about the Bumblebee trailer was that Knight looks to have his own vision for the way he wants to do things without being slavish to any iteration that went before. And that’s all I want from any director that comes in to have a stab at it in the coming years. I disagree with a lot of the sentiment of my fellow fans that a director needs to have been a fan, and have passion for the franchise, he just needs passion for what he is creating himself. And Bay had that whether you like what he did, or not.

 

Film franchises have to change and adapt or they get old, stale, and people just stop paying to see the latest installment of been there done that several times already.

I like Peter Jackson as a director but it was a mistake to have him do The Hobbit films. The Hobbit movie needed a very different tone and feel than Lord of the Rings but once Jackson gets going in that universe it's hard for him to control his impulse to go massive even in a book that wasn't about massive.

Or take the DCEU. At some point people seemed to get burned out on grim, dark, and gritty. Sure grim, dark and gritty worked great for Batman but after a while every movie being grim, dark and gritty gets to be insanely boring. Rather telling that the movie in the DCEU that everyone seemed to go crazy for was the one movie that threw out the play book of it has to be just like the Batman movies and the Snyder movies.

Bay, well Bay just doesn't change so if Bumblebee gets people all excited about Transformers again I don't know if anything could kill that new found good will faster than we are going back to the exact same things we did five movies in a row. Time for new tones and new feels to movies not some fans like it as is so we can never try to please anyone but those fans that haven't left.

 

Hello SilverOptimus! Allow me to respectfully disagree with this. I don't think Greece, where I'm from is the biggest market, and at the time Transformers originally came out, we weren't part of the european union market or anything like that. But Transformers has always been as common knowledge as Superman or Coca Cola. There is absolutely no person I've ever known in my life that wouldn't know who Optimus Prime, or Megatron are and what a transformer is, since the 80s. And that is the era of Transformers which is ingrained in people's minds here. I'd imagine this to be a similar case for US, UK and the rest of Europe. For us, here, the perception of the brand did not originate with the movies, but rather, sort of shifted. I distinctly remember Transformers being thought of and mentioned as a fond memory of a cool sci-fi cartoon. That changed when the movies came out and over time, mentioning your fondness for Transformers to anyone (meaning, the "general public"), would be sure to get you looked at funny or even ridiculed. Transformers weren't thought as trashy toy commercials before by Joe Average here, in my experience. I hope for that to change.

 

But it SHOULD/COULD have been so much BETTER! Someone else at the helm might reinvigorate this franchise. I agree with many others on here, even the design of BB in the new trailer is so much better than anything in the Bay movies. If done right, BB is going to get people to care about the Transformers characters themselves again. They need better characterization and personality. Maybe BB movie will bring that into the franchise.

 

Sweet baby Jesus no...
How many more hours of human military destroys random Decepticons in slow motion while cracking Mad Magazine jokes can a sane person take?

 

Indeed, the movies put Transformers out there on a global scale not even G1 achieved - the world was still a smaller place in the 80s.

But now that the foothold has been established, it's time to capitalize on it, by introducing something more, something more fresh. Bumblebee is looking to be exactly that because it isn't a full blown war film from what the trailer implies, even though we're still going to have classic Autobots vs Decepticons.

Enh, I actually didn't think Origins was that bad - really its worst offense was "Deadpool" because they literally just ruined the character to the point of sewing his mouth shut and just being some stupid "all their powers COMBINED!" crap like a knockoff Captain Planet. Mercifully, we got Deadpool in his own film (with the same actor even?) and that's Deadpool done RIGHT and I'm not even that big a Deadpool fan!

A friend has been tracking the state of views of the trailer on YT and he says that Bumblebee has gotten more views in one day to TLK's trailer TO DATE - 9M in a day vs 7m in a year.