Very sad.
Hopefully this one will tank. Or at least make about half what the first one did. Then the franchise will more than likely die.
In 10 or 20 years from now, studio execs looking around for something else to exploit will think, hey, remember that film Michael Bay did based on some toy... that made a shitload of money the first time. Maybe there's some more blood we can squeeze out of that stone.
Someone else in the board room will pipe in and say, yeah, but that may have been a fluke, the second movie did terribly.
The one half-intelligent person in the room will suggest that maybe what the franchise needs is just a new take and fresh start.
They'll shop around for directors and writers to try and get a new script. By chance they'll stumble across someone who actually gives a shit about the property and isn't just there to make money and big stupid movies. A director like Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, James Cameron or Christopher Nolan, who actually respect the material they are adapting to the screen and do so out of love, as opposed to Bay who works by masking his contempt for the fans of whatever it is he's shitting on.
Since they already had the big huge mainstream "Hollywood" version of the movie that "improved" on the original, they'll try for something different this time. Like Batman Begins, they won't be afraid of taking themselves too seriously, because they are looking for a new fresh take on the series. They know audiences have already had enough camp and popcorn flick fodder, they'll want something new, and so they'll be more likely to eat up something that treats the source material with total reverence. Exactly like Batman Begins, this new film couldn't have been made without the legacy of the bat nipples. Those abortions of prior films were necessary to convince executives that a serious take on the franchise could actually work and be something marketable.
To really set themselves apart, and since Bayformers was already made in the contemporary and mainstream world, they could try something more stylized. Maybe even a period film set in the 1980s along with all the original character's alt-modes in-tact.. lamborghini countaches, volkswagen beetles, F-15 Eagles... more importantly they could keep the characters personalities in-tact, and since they would have found a director that didn't hate the original movie and series, and one that didn't hate his target audience, they could make a film with title characters you actually gave a shit about and saw interacting with each other. They could even go all old-skool with the action scenes and buy a steady cam and hold shots for more than 1.5 seconds so you could follow what was going on.
THAT film, should be beautiful. 20 years from now.
and hopefully in the interim Michael Bay will die in a horrible fire due to a pyrotechnics accident on the set of Armageddon 2: Armageddoner.
uke:
