The especially hilarious and infuriating part about this sentiment is that there are plenty of people who get it for DC/TF but they never seem to be allowed anywhere near the current run of blockbuster movies. I mean even Fox, the black sheep studio of the Marvel movies, seems to have caught on with how they've been treating Deadpool. DC had it not too long ago with the Nolan Batman trilogy then lost it spectacularly when they tried to apply Batman's recipe for success to Superman and the DCEU in it's entirety (protip, what works for Batman will not work for Superman and what works for the Joker sure as hell won't work for Lex Luther).

Just look at Bayverse Optimus: everything about him from RotF onward would've fit better coming from Grimlock. Grimlock is the vindictive rage fueled murder machine with a hint of nobility, not Optimus.

 

Where Transformers failed was that at no point did Paramount or really anybody involved consider that they had to fix the way the movies conveyed the plot, story, and characters. As far as they were concerned, they could still make mindless blockbusters and people would eat it up, especially in foreign markets. AoE was in a sense the false positive because it made so much money on a completely asinine script and pretty CGI robots. All they did with TLK was try to essentially rope back in all the people who had liked the previous films and had been alienated by AoE pretty much being an aborted reboot trying to cut ties with the previous continuity except not really because then that would lose the momentum said continuity had going for it. Except somehow it came as a total surprise when TLK failed to achieve a level of success even on par with the first film which had much less going for it ten years ago.

It also was a problem how exactly they tried to go about setting up the Cinematic universe by making the exact same mistake The Mummy did. The Mummy spent more time worldbuilding than on the actual titular monster and so was a weak offering. AoE and TLK are similar in that they introduce a bunch of concepts that aren't fleshed out, with the intention of trying to leave as many openings to make crappy side films as possible with the 'knights' nonsense or going full Ancient Aliens and suddenly Transformers have been around all through history and somehow the millions of soldiers who fought right beside them through all time never wrote any of that shit down or told anybody...on top of apparently retconning the origins of the Transformers to a completely different race that is never explained. However, while the films are busy spinning poetic on all this fancy schmancy lore crap, they fail to actually concentrate on the story the films are supposed to tell in the first place. An elaborate backstory and history is worthless if you can't tell a decent story to keep people entertained and actually able to care about the characters such that the lore has real meaning.

You can set up a long term story without having to do all the front loading first at the cost of story. Take for example Captain America: The First Avenger, several years old at this point but still one of the MCU's strongest entries. This film has style, story, and hits all the standard notes for an exciting heroic narrative of a weak guy from Brooklyn becoming a national icon. But in the even bigger picture, this film introduces the first Infinity Gem. Except at no point in the film are the words 'Infinity Gem' even said, let alone any indication that the Tesseract is one of a set of six. All the audience needs to know is that it's this absurdly powerful object that exists on Earth. Transformers would have frontloaded the damn thing's entire history and significance into the faces of the audience to emphasize how important the plot device is to the big scheme of things.

 

Exactly, good luck getting people to care about a cinematic universe if the audience has no attachments to the characters who inhabit said universe.

There is a reason why the alley fight is the most referenced scene from that movie. It doesn't matter if Steve is the smallest guy in a large room, he will be the first to step up for what is right no matter how badly the deck is stacked against him. The grenade at boot camp was further enforcement in case there were any doubts. The First Avenger got the core of the character right. Those are the kind of scenes that make people lasting fans of characters, not how many bad guys they can kill in a CG battle scene.

 

Or the scene with the flagpole. Going into it, you just know that Steve will get the flag, but a bunch of army dudes who are way more built than Steve can't climb it (further reinforced by the army captain boasting about how he'd never seen anybody get the flag in so many years he'd been at the base). How will Steve do what actual soldiers can't?

Simple - the task was to get the flag. The captain never said you had to get it the hard way. So Steve just pulls out the braces and the flagpole topples over, the flag now within reach of anybody.

A small scene like that does wonders to illustrate something like a character's ability to think on the fly for out of the box solutions.

Where Transformers fails is this weird presumption that the robots simply are not interesting, despite having multiple films supposedly about them. AoE was the worst because they had to project human stereotypes into the designs - don't get me wrong, style like that can work I.E. ROTF Bludgeon, but AoE makes them too human. And they're all assholes. Hell, something that doesn't get brought up as much these days, but there was the infamous dance scene from I think the trailers that got cut, when ironically it probably would have provided a little shot of character the film badly needed.

And then TLK goes and amusingly proves how character is important even when it's a CGI character in a live action format. Cogman is arguably the breakout star of TLK, a dubious honor to be sure, but his wacky behavior certainly made him far more popular than Hot Rod, whose most defining trait was hating the fact he had a really bad French accent and he was a full fledged Transformer! Cogman doesn't have some shitty European super car alt. mode, or overwhelming basis on human stereotype (he's a butler but if anything that works in his favor because badass butlers are rare indeed), or famous voice actor, and yet he's the favorite character of so many people who actually think TLK isn't a steaming pile of dogshit. But even he isn't immune to having lore bullshit piled on without explaination - in the film he's refered to as a Headmaster...okay? We can guess from the fact his toy copied the Titans Return core gimmick and Nitro Zeus inexplicably just had a removable head that at some point, Cogman was supposed to take over his body as the toy designers only work off early film concepts in order for the toys to be ready when the final film actually releases. But unless you're wired into the community like us, nobody is generally going to guess that Cogman is supposed to become a head for a larger robot if all they know is what is in the film. It's just weird how the term stayed in the film when the only relevance it possibly ever had did not.

 

That was a memorable scene too, definitely a great example of showing why Captain America would make a great leader instead of just saying that he will make a great leader.

DotM Wheeljack/Que was far worse than anything in AoE for lazy stereotypical designs. Like really guys, you honestly think the audience is too stupid to catch that an Autobot could be an inventor unless he looks like a mechanical caricature of Albert Einstein? RotF Skids and Mudflap were pretty bad too but it was easier to write them off as botched comic relief characters while we were suppose to feel bad for Wheeljack in DotM.

Again it boils down to the TF being treated as nothing more than movie props to decorate the scene for the next big explosion. The sad thing is that the first film made an attempt at characterizing the bots and cons. Even if it didn't go much further than "Barricade is a really bad cop", "Jazz is a cool black guy", or "Ironhide is very trigger happy", at least those characters had a enough lines of dialogue to strike a conversation. Every line after the 07 movie from a TF could be summarized as "motivational speech", "heroic bot banter", or "snarling con retort".

 

well I sure did. Yes he may've looked like robot Einstein but did Soundwave really have to do Him like that?
That was fucked up and got what was comin' to Him.
#R.I.P.Queeljack

 

I think a key area where some studios fail with their cinematic universes is they don't have a plan if things go wrong. If Iron Man had failed well it wasn't like the movie made a great commitment out of the gate that everything over the next 10 years was going to be connected. If Guardians of the Galaxy had failed well they are way out in space away from the main Marvel/Disney action on Earth.

With DC and Warner Brothers making too many connections too early with the DCEU it seems like there wasn't a clear back up plan if people didn't like this darker, grittier, grimmer, more bleak view of the DC characters. Justice League feels like a mess because it's dark now all of a sudden we need to make it feel like everyone isn't just a variation of Batman. Universal had a logo for their Dark Universe before they even knew if people would actually go watch The Mummy.

Paramount seemed to follow that idea of everything will go right so don't have a plan if people get burned out on Transformers before we can start cranking films out like crazy.

 

That seemed to be what I was thinking too. They assumed the last two made upwards of a billion dollars apiece worldwide, and this one was going to be a slam-dunk with no effort put into it at all! However, I can't really enjoy a film where it feels like noone really wants to be there, let alone one where there's little intrigue to make me care about anyone.

 

It seems like it's a temptation to just keep doing more that infects all of entertainment. We've seen TV shows that started out well go down hill into something horrible because the network was well season one did far better than expected. Comic books seem to do the same thing with this title is on fire but they can't seem to stop publishing the title once there is really no where left to go. We've all seen singers or bands go from great albums to ouch.

It's very rare to see something like The Venture Brothers where it does well and they have an insanely loyal fan base but new seasons might be years in the waiting because the production team isn't going to do a season until they actually have a story to tell.

 

They were trying to please mostly kids.

 

I really loved the first four live action movies. But I hated The Last Knight. What the heck was that mess? Even while watching the trailers for that movie, I had a bad feeling that it was going to be an ugly film, and it was worse that I had expected.