The Last Knight star Mark Wahlberg isn’t convinced that Michael Bay is finished with Paramount’s Transformers universe – so a bit like the rest of us, really.
Wahlberg, who reprises the role of Cade Yeager in the recently-released Transformers: The Last Knight, fielded questions from ComicBook.com at the sequel’s red carpet event. When asked specifically about the future of the franchise, the Daddy’s Home actor delivered a rather frank assessment of the Transformers series and Bay’s instrumental role in it, and why he struggles to imagine a scenario in which the two are mutually exclusive.
Per CB:
You know it’s one of those things where Michael has built this entire universe right, and he will decide what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. Right now he says he doesn’t want to do another film and he says that after every film because they are so difficult to make and he pretty much has to do it single-handedly, even with all the help that he has because all of the movie is in his mind.
Ceding control of the Transformers franchise is something that Michael Bay has flirted with in the past, only to pull a U-turn at the 11th hour – in fact, the filmmaker previously hinted at the possibility of directing one of the many TF spinoff movies gestating over at Paramount. However that may be, Bay has gone on record time and time again to stress that, yes, The Last Knight is his last hurrah, and it’ll stand as a springboard for future installments in the burgeoning Transformerverse.
Wahlberg, on the other hand, has his doubts:
So he’ll decide that and I would be hard pressed to see him walk away and put it in somebody else’s control and care. I mean, that’s just the Michael that I know, but you never know, sometimes people decide to move on, so we’ll see what happens.
In our review of The Last Knight, Matt Donato deemed Bay’s latest to be a “daunting behemoth of a film and you can feel every ounce of dead weight, as sins of the past are committed without any signs of stopping.” This, coupled with a lowly 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, will surely have a huge impact on the sequel’s box office forecasts, after analysts predicted a franchise low of $72 million domestically.
We’ll have a better understanding of Transformers: The Last Knight‘s BO performance once the weekend rolls around but for now, tell us, what do you make of Michael Bay’s future? Does it belong with those robots in disguise, or without? Let us know in the usual place.