So I've been pondering how bad TF5 had to be (I should know it blew donkey balls), but someone or some people have poseted that it almost ruined Paramount and more films in the future with Bumblebee being the last ditch to fix it all. Anyone got a link to that? I heard it was a article from a year after TF5 premiered.

 

From the link in my sig:

TLK had everything riding on it, all it had to do was not fail...and the gamble backfired spectacularly for everyone involved.

 

I don't think they saw it as a gamble, they saw it as a sure thing. Four awful movies with four awesome box office hauls. Obviously Transformers was critic-proof, just throw in a lot of action and CGI and you can take that to the bank.

Well, TLK obviously undermined that approach. We should see it as a blessing in disguise. If nothing else, I'm sure Hasbro are better partners to be involved with on this franchise than HuaHua.

 

Kinda hoping there would be an article, but considering it's coming from SilverOptimus this is fine.

Damn that's a low blow if I ever saw one. Though hopefully this means Paramount will think twice before doing something that could backfire immensely.

 

If they weren't planned on making BBB a good movie either then yeah, It should've ruined them. One less awful studio to put up with but since that ain't the case; They still got a lot more atoning to do.

 

It was a gamble because AoE only did so well because of the massive amounts of pandering it did to the Chinese along with a contract with the Chinese government allowing Paramount a slightly bigger return on revenue than usual. TLK did not have special advertising, Chinese actor presence, or the greater profit contract, so it was based entirely on the assumption it could do as well as AoE without the supports as now that Transformers had been introduced, there was somehow a chance TLK could work where AoE wouldn't have worked otherwise.

And before I get dogpiled by the usual AoE White Knight defense platoon, you can't deny the film pandered the absolute loving fuck out of itself to the Chinese in an absurd number of ways and did succeed in that endeavor given it made the most money in that country.

 

I'm actually really surprised TLK wasn't set in China. After AOE, I remember an article popped up that said Paramount (or maybe Hasbro) was going to be continuing to focus on China, since AOE was such a big hit. I wonder what changed...

 

Jeez, they literally pissed off Hasbro so bad that they took the creative control from them like they were children.

 

I’m surprised Hasbro wasn’t involved since movie 1. Considering the fact they understand and care about their property better than Paramount I hope they gain more control for future films.

 

Hasbro will have more say moving forward. We can already see how much of an impact that can have with Bumblebee.
It's a good start in many ways.

 

I think it was more of an almost the last nail in the coffin sort of deal since Paramount had been making a lot of mistakes for a lot of years.

They couldn't really figure out what to do with their franchise films so if wasn't Mission Impossible or Transformers it wasn't going to be a strong box office contender. Toss in some really high profile flops like Bay Watch.

Paramount could see the domestic market for Transformers was dropping each film but they couldn't seem to figure out how to fix the problem. So they got this rather strange idea that somehow the Chinese market would always save them because the Chinese market was seeing such rapid growth with more theaters opening and more people having the disposable income to go watch movies. They seemed to just ignore all the warning signs that depending on that market was not a wise plan.

Yea other movies had lost money for Paramount but like other people have said the studio was banking on somehow the well would never go dry and it caught them off guard when it ended up not only loosing money for the studio but leaving them with just Mission Impossible as the only real contender they had to keep up with the other studios.

 

They should've jettisoned Michael Bay after Age of Extinction. Case in point, that movie, yes it did make over a billion worldwide, but it's domestic results were disappointing compared to the last three movies. The interest in the franchise was clearly starting to wane.

 

Because the reality is that it was NEVER more than just to grab money from literally the largest population of people who eat up filma like no tomorrow. Pandering to the Chinese can easily be seen as a way to inflate your profit and nothing more. I suspect that Paramount equated their pandering as actual success, and made TLK as a more "conventional" movie and...it bombed.

 

From what I recall, supposedly there was some business agreement with a Chinese company (sorry, can't recall the name). Said company was supposed to feature prominently via product placement in AOE. They weren't and, pissed off, they sued Paramount for breach of contract.
Some Sources:
Paramount sued by Chinese company for failed Transformers product placement;
https://io9.gizmodo.com/paramount-is-being-sued-for-not-having-enough-product-p-1773376707;
Paramount Pictures Sued for $27M in China Over 'Transformers 4' Product Placement

 

Baywatch wasn't a flop.

 

aoe was disapointing only because it didnt break records like dotm and rotf

It was still considered a huge sucesss

 

That's because the management of Hasbro didn't have the guts and imagination as Marvel's managers. They just wanted to sell toys and earn some money from the copyrights. The success of Ironman woke Hasbro up. Allspark studio was founded in 2009, the year after Ironman 1. Now Hasbro wants to become an entertainment company. That's why they want to have more say in the future live-action transformers films.

 

In an era of endless film series how a movie sets you up for the next movie is an important factor that can't be easily ignored.

Take Pacific Rim for example. For a production budget of $190 million a domestic run of $102 million and a rest of the world run of $309 million isn't exactly the sort of numbers that a studio would go oh we've got to make more of those. But Warner Brothers thought they could build a bigger box office with the sequel because the film had sort of a cult following.

On the flip side of that you have films where the movie might be able to squeeze out a profit of some sort but the movie left such a negative vibe that it's just setting up the next movie to fail. Sure something like Star Wars can likely survive Solo not bringing in a haul, but there are franchises where just one dud can bring the whole film franchise to an end.

 

AoE in a nutshell.

 

The worst parts of all the movies was relying on a hot chick and first LeBeouf and then Marky Mark not to mention cringe humor with the parents, etc instead of focusing on Transformers. Don't want anything about human b-plot. Reminds me of the Godzilla and AvP movies where I'm fast forwarding through the human people few give a crap about to get to the next scene with the title characters in it.