It’s being reported that Michael Bay may not be back for the third instalment in the Transformers franchise (assuming one is made), because he’s sick of getting negative reviews and wants to do something in a different genre. He’s been quoted as saying, “It’s easy to go shoot an art movie in a winery in the South of France. But people have no idea how hard it is to create something like Transformers. They (Critics) review me before they’ve even seen the movie.”
He also added, “After the three and a half years I’ve spent making these movies, I feel like I’ve had enough of the Transformers world… I need to do something totally divergent, something without any explosions.”
Sounds a bit like a mid-life crisis to us, but to be honest we wouldn’t count him out of another Transformers flick yet. It’s quite common for directors just coming off an arduous shooting and post-production schedule to declare they don’t want to do anything similar ever again (it’s also quite usual for them to start blaming the critics rather than admitting there’s anything wrong with the film and to say all other directors make an easier type of movie than they do). Give them a couple of months and they often come round.
We’d actually like to see a movie where Bay did something other than show off his actions chops, as it’d be nice to know whether he can do anything else. Whether the results would be worth watching are yet to be seen.