Michael Bay’s time at the helm of the Transformers franchise may have brought in billions of dollars at the box office, but the movies themselves kept getting progressively worse. As he is wont to do, the filmmaker steadily increased the levels of scale and spectacle while completely overlooking such trivial things as plot and character.
By the time fifth entry The Last Knight rolled around, things had gotten almost incomprehensibly stupid, and audiences clearly lost interest as a result. After Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction both crossed the $1.1 billion mark, Bay’s final entry in the series saw earnings fall off a cliff. 99% of blockbusters would kill for a haul of $605 million globally, but it was viewed as a huge disappointment by Paramount.
The Transformers writers’ room assembled over a dozen rising and established talents to map out the future of the franchise, but only managed to produce two scripts. The Last Knight was one of them, and Travis Knight’s Bumblebee was the other, with Christina Hodson delivering a nostalgia-tinged adventure that blended references to the lore with an engaging story.
It wasn’t a coincidence that the first movie without Bay calling the shots turned out to be the best by far, and Bumblebee‘s Rotten Tomatoes score of 91% was higher than the last three entries combined. Taking a break from his day job as President and CEO of Laika Animation Studios, Knight took to live-action like a duck to water to tell the heartwarming tale of Hailee Steinfeld’s Charlie Watson stumbling upon the titular Autobot. The Transformers prequel was added to the Netflix library just a couple of days ago, but has already managed to crack the streaming service’s Top 10 most-watched list.
from Movies – We Got This Covered https://ift.tt/2X5xIIr
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