Very few franchises in the history of cinema have been proven immune from the law of diminishing returns, but even less have fallen off a critical cliff quite as rapidly as the Michael Bay era of Transformers, and the first installment was hardly universally acclaimed to begin with.
It’s far and away the best of Bay’s five contributions to the mythology, though, and the live-action introduction of the Autobots and Decepticons has been making a charge up the streaming charts. As per FlixPatrol, Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky discovering his first car is a giant alien robot has ascended to the upper echelons of the Paramount Plus most-watched list, 15 years after making a huge dent at the box office.
By the time the dust had settled on Bay’s quintet, the Rotten Tomatoes scores had dropped from a respectable 58% for the opening salvo, to the embarrassing 15% of The Last Knight. In fact, the numbers fell by over a half between the first and second entries, with Revenge of the Fallen and its giant swinging robot balls topping out a dire 20%.
Dark of the Moon was an ever-so-slight return to form, before Age of Extinction brought the saga crashing back down to earth. Bumblebee was great, which has everything to do with the change in director, and gives us reason to be optimistic for Steven Caple Jr.’s Rise of the Beasts.
Sadly, we all wish that Bay had listened to Steven Spielberg’s advice and stopped making Transformers movies much sooner than he actually did.