Upcoming Live-Action Film Rumors

Superomegaprime said:

Honestly, I'm not sure why Paramount are looking at Bay & Spielberg

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The least successful Michael Bay Transformers movie made more money than anything since, with the last Transformers movie totally bombing.

Given RotB's disappointing returns and TFO's utter box office collapse... Paramount is probably nostalgic for TLK's numbers.

As for Spielberg... I don't know what to tell you, man. He's a Hollywood legend, was involved in the making of the first live action movie with Bay that is still seen pretty positively today.

And I liked Disclosure Day

Haywire said:

Lots and lots of scenes of people staring at things off-camera in awe/terror/amazement/surprise.

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DULL SURPRISE!!!!

Sabrblade said:

That first movie always did feel like two different movies smushed together, with one being a whimsical coming-of-age story about a suburban American teenager getting his first car which turns out to be a living being in disguise, and the other being a political thriller action flick about the military being attacked by an unknown enemy who's trying to hack into the government and leaving the Pentagon stumped and on edge about who or what this deadly new threat to national security really is.

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Personally, I would really say that the political thriller C-plot is closely tied to Sam's plot (which includes the search for the Allspark, since he has the key to finding it) and it's the military action scenes (which don't really make a complete plot on their own) that only occasionally intersect with either.

Sector Seven is prominent to both Sam's plot and Maggie's but only has one notable scene involving Lennox (him telling them they don't have actual authority).

Frenzy, the Decepticon who actually does the most, similarly ties Sam's plot and the hacking stuff together but not military's role.

Yeah technically Blackout was also looking for the Allspark, but his actions don't meaningfully contribute to how anyone on any side actually finds it, and also aren't necessary for kicking off the political thriller parts, since Frenzy's hacking was detected anyway and that's when we first see Maggie.

On the one hand, you've got a military intrigue film about the U.S. Army facing an unknown enemy threat that has the Pentagon stumped enough to call in outside help from young analysts and hackers, while a small band of soldiers are on the run for their lives.

And on the other hand, you've got a whimsical coming-of-age film about a boy getting his first car in hopes of impressing the girl he has a crush on, and his car turns out to actually be an extraordinary being from outer space, who helps the boy get the girl and takes them both on a life-changing, whirlwind adventure.

...And somewhere in there, you've got a Transformers film with Autobots and Decepticons coming to Earth from Planet Cybertron and fighting each other over the AllSpark. This was used as the glue that helped tie those other two films together, but still really feels like Bay wanted to make the military intrigue film while Spielberg wanted him to make the coming-of-age film instead. Thus, the end result feels like a mashed-together compromise.

Consequently, because the film needed to hurriedly bring everyone together in its final act, some parts of this mashed-together compromise feel really underdeveloped. The hacker subplot with Maggie and Glen gets hastily interrupted and halted by having the two of them arrested and locked in an interrogation room for nearly the entirety of the film's second act, all to give more room to the other ongoing plot threads and to introduce yet another one whose inclusion felt really unfinished: Sector Seven. They just show up out of nowhere halfway through the movie to interrupt it for a while, only getting things back on track when they're suddenly used to bring all of the separate casts of characters together at Hoover Dam.

The introductory scene for them with the vans pulling up to Sam's house and Simmons going, "We're the government! Sector Seven!" just felt really rushed and forced in out of nowhere. This is why I feel they should have used the hacker subplot to better set up Sector Seven: In the earlier scene when Maggie and Glen go "Project: Iceman?" "What's Sector Seven?", they are almost immediately interrupted by a mysterious SWAT team arresting them. In the scene as is, we're just supposed to believe that they're the police or agents of the Pentagon arresting them merely because Maggie was found out for sneaking top secret information out into public.

But this arrest scene could have had one more shot of Maggie and Glen in handcuffs being dragged out of the house by the SWAT team with two mysterious men in suits and dark glasses silently observing and overseeing the situation, letting the audience silently and visually tell that these two are the ones charge of this arrest. And since we wouldn't have seen these two men before, we'd be left wondering just who they and their SWAT team are if they're not the police or the Pentagon. Said two men would be Simmons and Banachek, giving us our first glimpse at Sector Seven without telling us right away. The first clue to their identity before its confirmed later would be that the arrest happened right after Glen said, "What's Sector Seven?", giving the organization an almost Beetlejuice-like quality.

We know for a fact that the final act didn't get as much development. One early script didn't have it at all.

I still want to read that script but it seems to be lost media now.

The Sector Seven thing is supposed to come out of nowhere. We're focalized on Sam, and we're meant to be as surprised by their arrival as he is. Prior to this he was reeling from the shock that his car was an alien robot, and here he's shocked anew by the fact that he's not the first to discover they exist. And this shock and awe situation is likewise meant to make them immediately dislikable because all we know if them is that they're overly aggressive and that Simmons is a jerk (this is one area where a tighter, better script and less Bayism would have helped).

I don't mind that this "turns into a different movie" at that point; other movies have done this handoff well. The "this is multiple movies in one" take actually feels like an over-reading of how this movie actually pretty effectively shows how Transformer arrival would affect different circles in different ways. Soldiers would be facing unkillable (for now) new threats, civilians would discover everyday vehicles are actually aliens (and bring the most relatable vibe of not knowing which of the ones surrounding you is one), and the government and other powerful organizations would be keeping track of it all. They're just all given a lot of runtime do the characters in each get fleshed out (to varying degrees), and really, that's a good thing.

Actually this is one thing the movies in general have done well. 2007 has all this. DOTM has the long-standing Gould alliance. AOE has two parts of a fiendish alliance, and an inventor encountering new tech (sadly this aspect is never the focus and it quickly becomes about 8 Rules For Objectifying My Teenage Daughter). Bumblebee is perhaps 2007 done right, or at least better, scaling back the other aspects to focus on Charlie and Bee. ROTB has a conflicted thief finding s bigger calling, and the even better example of the Maximals integrating into human cultures (a movie that was JUST that would be lovely). ROTF doesn't have much of this, and TLK has the Arthurian/Witwiccans stuff that is just a mess presented as is. It isn't uniformly well done, but there's so much potential in the interaction that I may never be on board with the fandom insistence on "NOTHING BUT ROBOTS ON CYBERTRON!"

It’s how I feel about the Cybertron games vs the ROTF game. The High Moon games are better games by most metrics, however, the ROTF is a better Transformer game. The transforming bit just becomes a means of travel without interacting with humans.

LordGigaIce said:

The least successful Michael Bay Transformers movie made more money than anything since, with the last Transformers movie totally bombing.

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Can't imagine any of Bay's would do any better if marketing was as bad as TFOne's was.

Bumblebee is TF07 done wrong. It's solid and smooth and "quality" but actually terrible. Sam's plot benefits from the rest of the chaos. It's a twist that one of these alien war machines is seemingly friendly, before the rest of the Autobots show up and explain what's been going on. Bumblebee immediately blows its load with the grand Cybertron battle, leaving no room for the unfolding wonder that TF07 had. And for us it kinda works. It's how we're used to Transformers cartoons working. And against the backdrop of 10 years of Bay, it works. It was kinda cool to finally see that. But in a vacuum, it's a terrible structure for a movie. If we got that in 2007 the box office results would have been... actually probably not too different from how Bumblebee ended up performing. It's a movie that was released and made a profit, and that's about it.

TF07 is messy around the edges and the pacing utterly dies for a bit, but the structure is vastly superior. And it doesn't look like a film that was stored in a dusty room for 20 years before being scanned for DVD as-is without any attempt at cleaning.

Sounds like the flaw is entirely the fanservice intro then, which I have no issue cutting from the movie or taking only the relevant info from and adding to the "memories recovered" portion. Frankly I'm entirely fine just not having it at all, since all it really is there for is to pop the crowd (no need for the wonder to unfold for that audience, a decade into a film franchise), and leaving it in just takes attention and investment away from the Earth-based story. The rest of the structure is fine, if incredibly basic, keeping everything else to the side so the focus is on the main pair.

It's also definitely taking a softer approach to color than the supersaturated approach Bay tends to take. The latter admittedly looks very striking, but the former is in tune with the period piece Bumblebee is. Each is right for the movie they're making. Really my main issue with it is that the human characters outside of Charlie and Agent Cena are pretty bland.

I'm not saying now, nor did I, nor would I, that this as is should've been what we got in 2007. There are things it does way better, and with more care, but Bay's take in 2007 was definitely what the brand needed and what worked the best for that cinema playing field.

Sector Seven doesn't really come out of nowhere, though? As soon as Blackout's attack happens, you have that one agent (Banachek?) showing up trying to brief the leadership on what they know, and everyone ignores him until later in the movie, when we find out how big a deal Sector Seven really is.

That's fair, I'd forgotten about that. Nevertheless, that's enough setup for the group then.

LBD Nytetrayn said:

Can't imagine any of Bay's would do any better if marketing was as bad as TFOne's was.

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TFO's failure is kind of legendary due to how badly it bombed, and marketing is a huge part of that (though I'd argue not as big as some people want it to be).

But even setting that aside... Bumblebee made less than TLK, but had stronger legs, maintaining consistent audiences longer despite a weaker opening. Which tells me the audience may have been burnt out on Bay's Transformers but they were willing to turn up due to positive word of mouth. And while the BBM made less than TLK, Paramount seemed happy with it.

RotB, however, is the real key here because it didn't just do worse than the BBM, it had worse legs. And the big GI Joe reveal at the end confused every non-Transformers fan I knew who saw it, with one of my buddies asking me why it wasn't Sector 7.

RotB may have been affected by some lingering fatigue with the Bay films (but not nearly as much as some people want to insist it was) but unlike the BBM it wasn't getting people into theatres through word of mouth.

TFO is such an odd duck due to a multitude of factors leading to its downfall, as well as its fully animated nature, that you really have to set it aside.

RotB though? That was Paramount and Hasbro attempting to take the new direction started with the BBM, and use it as a launching point to do a Bay-style spectacle, and it failed. That, more than TFO, is probably why Bay's coming back. If you're going to ape the man's style, might as well get the guy himself.

Bay's next movie may be a mess, but at least I know it'll be shot beautifully and the final migraine inducing battle won't take place in a bland, CGI DBZ wasteland like RotB's did. It'll be more of a genuine spectacle if nothing else.

You take that back. Only Goku vs Vegeta took place in a wasteland, maybe Cell if you count hin blowing up the arena.

unluckiness said:

You take that back. Only Goku vs Vegeta took place in a wasteland, maybe Cell if you count hin blowing up the arena.

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Planek Namek was a whole global wasteland, just colored teal instead of tan.

It was a grassland with trees and lakes until the core blew up

I seem to recall ROTB creating the impression that it was surprisingly still in theaters and people were still watching, I think past its run in some places. It had legs, especially for the time (Elemental also struggled early on, but I think eventually started doing well). But that's just the impression that I get, and is not really a comment about quality (it was definitely too soon to go back to that specific well of "throw a million things in there").

I'm more or less just shrugging and resigning myself to more Bayhem in the script, but at least it'll have some standout visual moments. The man has his zone and he does that like few others really can, but I hope he's willing to just focus on that and let better minds handle the writing and tone.

Undead Scottsman said:

I.E. The Transformers/GI Joe crossover movie is apparently canceled.

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I honestly am kind of bummed about this. I think that the concept had a lot of potential. I mean they focused so much on the humans in the Bayverse films, why not make them interesting and a reason for being there for a change? Iconic GI JOE characters fighting along with Autobots to save Earth from the Decepticons would be an awesome movie. Have it end with the remaining Decepticons teaming up with some evil humans to hide them and form Cobra. Then we get Cobra attacking using Decepticon technology that creates armies of BATs in the second film.

Lots of crazy stuff they could do with this concept. Like I said, I am bummed that they are abandoning it, rather than refine it.

We'll have to settle for NEST.

NEST at least has had two movies and a theme park ride.