For every dollar Transformers: Dark Of The Moon made at the box office, someone on the internet made a snarky comment either about Michael Bay, the acting abilities of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, or the relative merits of the movie itself, which saw a massive metal space prawn attack Chicago.
Whatever you thought about the 2011 franchise entry, there’s no denying it was a success. This might explain why Michael Bay’s coming back to direct a fourth film, even though he said the third one would be his last (in fact, he said he wasn’t going to make a third Transformers movie after 2009’s Revenge Of The Fallen, but we’ll gloss over that).
While talking to The Huffington Post about his movies, including his forthcoming passion project, the bodybuilding heist movie Pain & Gain, Bay also mentioned Transformers 4. His decision to make the fourth Transformers was, he revealed, the result of an epiphany he had in the wake of a transforming robot-themed ride at Universal Studios.
“I thought I was done, then the ride came out. And then you’re thinking, Oh my God, someone’s going to take this over,” Bay said. “And you start doing a lot of soul-searching. The studio says they want to restart the franchise, and someone could come in here and screw it up, you know?”
Bay therefore made the decision to stay on as the custodian of the Transformers franchise, and hopes to steer it towards a secure long-term future - which might never have happened had it fallen into the hands of a hack director.
As you may already know, Transformers 4 will serve as a reboot of sorts, and will introduce a new range of robots as approved by Hasbro, who were unhappy with the toy sales following Dark Of The Moon. But while it’s said that the next film will be made without the involvement of the previous picture’s stars, neither will it pretend that the events of the earlier movies didn’t take place.
“We’re basically taking the history of where it was,” Bay revealed, “or where we left it in Chicago. And we’re going to carry it on from there.”
Transformers 4, then, will begin in the shattered husk of Chicago city, where a fresh roster of Autobots will do battle with a new army of evil Decepticons. We’ll also be introduced to a new group of human characters too, though exactly who will play them has yet to be announced. We just hope those giant space prawns make at least a cameo appearance.
More Transformers 4 news as it comes in.
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