Please don't give me ideas  

 

Best ending honestly. Paramount stops big budget films EXCEPT transformers (and gi joe )

 

This can mean 1 or 2 things
1. Paramount drops big budget movies but sticks with big TF movies since hasbro is paying for them anyway and its fundamentally different than other paramoun properties
or
2. Hasbro leaves and gets that Disney money...Maybe even making transformers return to marvel

 

At least initially, that wasn't the case - the 2007 film was viewed as a flawed, but promising start... sadly, they couldn't maintain that momentum for ROTF. However, you are right in that Bay did make Transformers lose critical respectability.

To elaborate - as much as we all like to think that they're objective, film critics, being human beings, are just as biased as the rest of us. With things like comic book movies, they're going to look more favourably towards things that they already find respectable. For instance, Batman has had critical respectability for quite a long time - even pre-Nolan. The reason why, at least in the eyes of some, is that Batman is half superhero comic, half psychodrama - Batman has had some very complex stories dealing with some very sophisticated themes (e.g. The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke), with some very complex characterisation. As well as this, Batman, for the most part, has minimal fantastical elements - compared to other superhero properties, Batman's relatively grounded.

Marvel have gained respectability with the MCU - because of a focus on story and characterisation, managing to make something that audiences emotionally connect with even when the premise is, seemingly, too absurd to be taken seriously.

Even the worst MCU films are still great - I didn't like Black Widow (even though I went to see it twice - once with my nine-year-old cousin and once with my older sister, who was pissed she'd been left out), but I would rate it over any of the Bayverse sequels any day.

Thanks to Bay, Transformers still does not have respectability. That is a fact. Bumblebee was certainly a step in the right direction to getting that cinematic respectability (which, despite what all the '86 movie fans claim, we never had - the '86 movie sucked) that it would be nice to have - we will just have to see whether ROTB can continue that same momentum.

With ROTF, we know why it sucked. Like most of the stinkers from that period (e.g. GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, X: Men Origins: Wolverine, Terminator: Salvation) ROTF's issues can be traced back to the Writer's Strike. because they were putting half-formed scripts into production (or starting production without a script). This, in hindsight (and even in foresight) , was, absolutely, a stupid thing to do- however, the only big movie I can think of that was delayed explicitly because of the writer's strike was Angels and Demons (and that was only because director Ron Howard and lead actor Tom Hanks were both, commendably, supporters of the strike - Howard even picketed alongside the strikers)... and that didn't really save it from being crap.

What doomed the Bayverse sequels aside from ROTF is unclear - Spielberg being less involved creatively, Hasbro gradually moving away from the Bayverse and towards, initially, the Aligned continuity and, then, the Generations toyline (and their work with IDW Publishing), Paramount and Lorenzo gaining greater creative power, leading to the disastrous attempt to retool TLK (which Bay was clearly intending as a finale, with maybe Bumblebee as a swan song) into the jumping-off point for a cinematic universe... it could be all of those reasons or none of them. Whilst it's certainly telling that Bumblebee had a) Spielberg involved in the story and b) Hasbro as an actual production partner and it turned out very, very well, this is all conjecture.

Now, it's undeniable that the franchise received a massive boost in popularity from the films - this is something I can speak from direct experience. I was ten years old when the '07 film came out and I went to see it, as did everybody in my class. On our last day of primary school, our teacher brought Transformers in for us to watch because it was the film we'd all requested. In the Year 5/6 class of '07-'08 of Great Crosby Catholic Primary School, if you hadn't seen Transformers, you were a nobody. In fact, on our last day of primary school, our teacher brought Transformers in for us to watch - we'd all requested it.

Maybe it's a cultural thing, since I don't think the Unicron Trilogy (or indeed, anything between Sunbow and the '07 film) was ever that big a deal in the UK. I remember seeing a couple of episodes of TF: Cybertron before the '07 movie came out (I definitely remember the one where Starscream releases all the Ancient Decepticons), so nobody was totally unfamiliar, but I don't think anyone in my age group was really all that into the franchise prior to the first movie. Would a really good animated series have had the same effect? I'm not sure.

 

Very well written response and agreed on everything with a caveat. I agree the '07 movie gave Transformers a boost in popularity, BUT Transformers was already mainstream by that point. Other than that I 100% agree  .

I think Transformers' stories struggle in mainstream context because they are best served taking inspiration from both historical and contemporary societal conflicts. Which in today's polarized world can be difficult to do for a mainstream audience. So instead we deal with x object will be needed to do y movie plots.

 

It took it from a big-time toy franchise to a full-on multi-media titan.

 

That is true yes.

 

Scourge.

And no, despite people somehow insisting that a black truck named Scourge somehow is even remotely the same thing, we already know that character has more in common with The Fallen than RID Scourge because of the flame beard. Scourge is the OG Nemesis Prime.

This is objectively incorrect. Transformers from day 1 has been multi-media, since the first thing to come out for G1 was actually the Marvel comic title, not the toyline or the cartoon which are far more well remembered.

All the bayverse did was propel the franchise back into greater mainstream awareness, but not on the same level as what it had been back in the mid 80s where it was a cultural phenomenon.

 

That's not what I meant. Sure it's always had multimedia, but it was never as massively popular as it was once the live-action movies started getting made.

 

Yeah I think what @samisham is trying to say the same thing as you and me, 07 boosted its popularity, but it was already in the mainstream. Correct me if I'm wrong @samisham .

 

I think it was still more popular in the 80s even compared to the height of the bayverse but since I wasn't alive in the 80s, I can't really say for certain. It just seems like there was just more everything back in the 80s.

 

So basically what you're telling me is that more thought and planning will have to go into a movie to make sure it's a good movie that people will want to see??? How is this bad news???

 

I doubt that honestly, Bayverse has already been running longer than G1 and 2 combined, and some of these movies made $1b each. In contrast, the G1 movie didn't break even when it was first released, it became popular as a cult movie later.

 

I feel like, excluding the length of time the franchises have been around (since I do agree bayverse has run far too long), that's kind of not being fair to G1 because what its measure of success 40 years ago is a far cry from what the bay films were measured by.

 

I was a dumb baby so I can't help you there  . I don't know if the data exists.

 

That's true, but I think it's unfair to compare anything else in TF to Bayverse's insane multi-billion dollar success.

 

Well, I certainly respect that's your opinion, but at the end of the day, that's all it is - an opinion. There are plenty of people who would argue just the opposite, and their opinions are just as valid.

I disagree. What the MCU has been doing is the same thing that the comics have been doing since, well, their inception: tailoring the characters and stories to the audience at the time. At this point, some characters have been retconned multiple times over (looking at you, Spidey). There have been reboots and alternate timeline versions and dopplegangers and false memories and clones ... Any number of plot devices used to tell the audience "forget what you just read, THIS is canon now, or at least until we need to mix things up again." Kinda hard to say that the comics' versions of the characters are the "superior versions" when the comics hardly have a "definitive" version.

Yeah, I guess we should ignore the box office returns, all the press that the movies get, the merchandising done off the movies and overall awareness about the MCU. We forgot that the true litmus test for success was your opinion. LOL

 

Personally I’m in the camp of thinking Universal would be the best and make the most sense in terms of a new studio who buys the film rights. Some people have said WB, but that kinda would have me concerned with how much executive meddling has gone behind the scenes of, like, every single fucking DC movie they’ve made in recent years. Seriously, the fact that seemingly every DCEU movie has a “release the X cut” hashtag implies that nearly every single one they’ve done had been heavily tampered with by the execs who clearly have no idea what the fuck they’re doing.

On second thought, I could also see Legendary taking a crack at it. But since they’ve got their own universe I feel like a second dedicated series might be a bit much.

 

As I mentioned earlier, they distributed the Jem and Battleship films.

 

Paramount lost their big movie mojo and just couldn't figure out how to get it back. Everything was blamed on the old leadership, they hyped up how they were going to be a better studio not making the same mistakes, then they release things like Snake Eyes to show they have learned nothing. It feels like they are now banking everything on there being a huge nostalgic demand for dipping back into Top Gun. It just feels like Paramount is clueless to where the cultural zeitgeist is so they hope if they do the same thing over and over maybe tastes in movies will loop back around.

As a film fan I could really look forward to an era when the Hollywood studios don't have to make the films around how can we make the Chinese censors happy. It feels like a lot of creative freedom has been crushed under the idea of we have to make films that can play in the Chinese market.

With how Paramount has treated fans I can't say I'd be sad to see Hasbro take their ball to another studio. If a studio can make an endless franchise about cars that go Fast then I'd excited to see how a studio like Universal could do fast cars that turn into robots. Less confident about Warner Brothers, but I don't see a studio move having to be Disney. Hell I'll take any move that means never having Lorenzo di Bonaventura attached again.