Steven Spielberg told Michael Bay to stop making Transformers movies

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"I made too many of them"

Transformers: The Last Knight
(Image credit: Paramount Pictures)

Michael Bay has revealed that Steven Spielberg advised him to stop making Transformers movies after the third one. 

"I made too many of them," Bay recently told Unilad UK. "Steven Spielberg said, 'Just stop at three'. And I said I’d stop. The studio begged me to do a fourth, and then that made a billion too. And then I said I’m gonna stop here. And they begged me again. I should have stopped. [But] they were fun to do."

Bay directed five Transformers movies between 2007 and 2017 – two more than Spielberg's recommendation. The fourth movie, 2014's Transformers: Age of Extinction, was the only movie that year to gross over $1 billion, while 2017's Transformers: The Last Knight was a box office flop with an estimated loss of over $100 million. 

"It was technology we didn’t know would work, and then it became very successful," he continued. "It was the first time digital effects were that highly reflective, so it broke a lot of new ground. It was a fun experience. It made more than [$709 million], that’s a lot of movie tickets and a lot of people that have seen it."

Bay's latest movie, Ambulance, stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as adopted brothers who hijack an ambulance and take two EMTs hostage after a bank heist goes wrong. Meanwhile, the Transformers series is coming back with a new trilogy of movies, but not from Bay.

Emily Garbutt
Entertainment Writer

I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism.