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.
Ambulance is currently out in the UK and arrives in the US on April 8. For more viewing inspiration, check out our list of the other upcoming movies on the horizon in 2022 and beyond.
