Well, oopsie on my part. Advanced release is a final release.

OK, cool. Can we at least root for the best then?

Spider-Man for example technically speaking died in 2014 before he became a big thing again in 2016 and now 2018.

If you're really a box office expert. I'd like an explanation for Justice League and Aquaman then. I really need some observation from a lot of sides rather than just one.

Cause Aquaman first released in China first before it's even fully released in the States. And in between, other countries see it early.

 

I am in the middle I like AOE the most. But DOTM is such a perfect ending. Sam finally grew up to be a man. Karama took out Starscream for picking on Sam in the past two movies. Also, it was the big final war between the bots and cons.

But AOE had lots of things I liked such as the A-Team in Autobot form being chased by a Clint Eastwood style bounty hunter who is not bot or con. Also Just Godzilla like dinosaurs along with one of the greatest actors to ever live Marky Mark.

TLK, on the other hand, crapped all over both AOE and DOTM gave us messed up timelines, even messing up the history of the knights Lockdown spoke of. Plus it did one thing that even fans of the movies don't like tying human history and transformer together to the point that it is implied Autobots freed all slaves and fought in every war ever.

 

Trust me, I want the best for the franchise...and right now simply trying to retool a Bayverse prequel into a kinda-sorta-maybe reboot along the same lines isn't going to work. A complete and total clean break is necessary to disassociate from the bad taste TLK left in everybody's mouths and really get across the idea that they're actually starting over. As would Bumblebee actually being able to talk instead of the whole R2B2 schtick that's outlived its welcome.

You got me when it comes to DC - hell, my dad says he wants to go see Aquaman purely for the visuals, and that's a guy who grew up as a Marvel loyalist since the day he could read!

 

Totally agreed. I was very impressed with the voice actor they picked for the Bee movie, I hope when they sequel comes around they just drop the radio gimmick and let him reprise the role. Would like Bee to keep the VW Beetle too, but the former is more important.

 

I think a great deal of blame has to go to the Paramount leadership at the time because they seemed to be stumbling around in the dark at the time.

They couldn't figure out what to do with GI Joe since they wanted something like a reboot but it couldn't contradict anything from the previous film and all done on a smaller budget. They read too much into the box office on Teenage Mutant Turtles so the sequel was a box office disaster. They couldn't even manage to cash in on the big anniversary for Star Trek when people might have been a little more forgiving.

It was also the period where they got this wacky idea that the Chinese market would be this unending fountain of money for anything Hollywood released there. Domestically the Transformers movies were seeing a worrying slide but Paramount acted like screw the domestic market China is where all the money will be at.

So with Mission Impossible and Transformers being the only franchises that had a good shot at making the yearly top 10 it's likely Paramount felt like they were in a spot where they had to do more Transformers. But instead of just rebooting like Batman or Spider Man it was no no keep doing the same thing even though Bay might have been able to launch some other franchise for them if we wasn't chained to Transformers.

 

I didn't hate Bumblebee. I liked it.

And I'm not sure why you need to say that "TLK proved me right." That's not how opinions work. It just means TLK didn't make as much money as the others, but the difference in quality between, say, TLK and RotF was minimal, even if the latter made three times as much domestically. So just because less people saw TLK than RotF, it doesn't mean RotF is better than TLK. And I say that as someone who enjoys RotF more than TLK and thinks RotF is hugely underrated.

I would have preferred a more focused Transformers 5 with Galvatron, Quintessons, and Nemesis Prime as the Quints' puppet to what we got with Witwiccans and Unicron being the Earth, but not everything has to go my way. In fact, one of the reasons AoE is my favorite TF film is because it went in a direction that wasn't predictable, and hence didn't fit my vision for post-DotM, but also made sense. It pleasantly surprised me as a result, more than any of the other films by far, and not for its superficial aspects, but for its story and characters and for the roles the robots played; Contrary to wasting its robots, it actually uses its robots very well for what it is going for. I enjoyed it for its own merits, for the Transformers film it was trying to be, and it actually made me think. And that last point is the most credit I can give to any film.

 

Transformers Movies shouldnt have ended with DOTM but the story should have ended after Optimus scanned the new truck mode in AOE but before he revealed his Knight robot mode .... for me that was where the movies plummeted downward .

 

Absolutely. AOE and TLK disappoint me when I re-watch them. The first three I can quite happily watch again.

 

Definitely, yes.