It’s an unfortunate fact of life that the best franchises aren’t always the ones that makes the most money, and very rarely was that sentiment proven truer than during Michael Bay’s stint at the helm of Transformers.
In an exceedingly rare turn of events, reviews got progressively worse with each passing installment, even though his quintet of nonsensical epics combined to earn well in excess of $4 billion at the box office. To put things into perspective, Travis Knight’s Bumblebee – which is the lowest-grossing of the live-action Transformers series – scored a higher Rotten Tomatoes approval rating than Bay’s Revenge of the Fallen, Dark of the Moon, Age of Extinction, and The Last Knight combined.
There was hope that Steven Caple Jr.’s Rise of the Beasts would be a lot more Bumblebee than Bay, even if eyes were rolled when it was announced as the first chapter in a trilogy right out of the gate. However, The Hot Mic podcast has offered some insight into the production, and the prognosis isn’t good.
“They’re getting a little worried about Transformers. I wanted to caution you in this draft. This is what they said, they said that Transformers has gone through close to a dozen different editing teams that have argued about different cuts of the film. I’ve got to be honest: A few weeks ago, a friend who’s a source of mine who has connections with that studio and people involved in that situation told me the same thing. He had heard that the movie’s a mess and that they’re trying to fix it.”
It’s worth pointing out that none of the information has been corroborated or confirmed as of yet, and for all we know Rise of the Beasts could turn out to be a spectacular fresh start for the sagging property. On the other side of the coin, though, would anyone really be all that surprised if the world was rewarded with yet another terrible Transformers film?