Michael Bay Says Steven Spielberg Told Him To Take A Break From Making Transformers Movies: “I Should’ve Stopped”

Steven Spielberg once told Michael Bay to stop making Transformers movies after the third one.

But Bay didn’t listen to Spielberg, who was the executive producer on the toys-inspired franchise that started in 2007 — after 2011’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, he did two more sequels.

Speaking to Unilad UK during the press tour of his movie Ambulance, Bay, 57, said, “I made too many of them. 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 should have quit while he was ahead. In a 2011 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Spielberg said Dark of the Moon was “the best of the three” he had made then. He added, “I certainly can’t imagine anybody other than Michael being equipped to make another Transformers. He’s invented a genre, and he’s got the secret formula.”

Spielberg, 75, himself broke that trilogy rule when he did Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, his fourth entry in the swashbuckling series starring Harrison Ford. Is that why he handed directing duties for the yet-to-be-titled fifth chapter over to James Mangold? Hmmm…

Of the five movies, 2011’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon and 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction earned more than US$1 billion (S$1.35 bil) worldwide. But fatigue and the law of diminishing returns set in with the fifth one, The Transformers: The Last Knight, which was not only critically panned (no surprises), but also made the least money with US$605 million.

While Bay didn’t listen to his mentor to stop after three Transformers flicks, he did heed his advice in the alleged firing of Megan Fox from Dark of the Moon, following her interview in Wonderland magazine where she likened Bay to Hitler and labelled him “a nightmare to work for.”

In a 2011 GQ interview, Bay claimed it was Spielberg who made the call to can Fox. The Schindler’s List director, however, said he had nothing to do with it. “That’s not true,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “That didn’t happen.”

Spielberg and Bay go back a long way. When Bay was 15, he was an intern at Lucasfilm. There, he first came across the storyboard for Raiders of the Lost Ark and thought the movie would suck (but changed his mind after seeing the movie.) Bay recounted the story to Spielberg when they finally met in the 1990s when he became an in-demand music video and commercial auteur (like the ‘Got Milk?’ ad).

In 2005, Bay directed his first Spielberg-produced movie, The Island, the sci-fi thriller starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. Shortly after that, Spielberg pitched the Transformers movie to the Master of Bayhem. And the rest is history.

Bay isn’t totally done with the shape-shifting robots: He stayed on as executive producer for the 2018 spin-off movie Bumblebee, as well as the upcoming Transformers: Rise of the Beast, slated to drop next year. He also served as creative consultant for Transformers: The Ride, the four-and-a-minute-long 3D ride launched at Universal Studios Singapore in 2011.

Outside the Transformers series, the other sequel t he reformed megaphone smasher made was 2003’s Bad Boys II, the follow-up to his 1995 feature debut Bad Boys, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Martin Lawrence and Oscar-winning slapper Will Smith. Bay sat out on the third entry, Bad Boys For Life, but showed up in a cameo.

Bay’s latest, Ambulance, a Grand Theft Auto-esque heist thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Eiza Gonzalez, is now in cinemas. Watch 8days.sg's exclusive interview with Bay here:

Photos: TPG News/Click Photos