Michael Bay Reveals What Kept Him From Leaving Transformers

Through a decade of productions and four previous movies in the franchise, the fifth installment of Transformers nearly didn’t happen — or at least nearly didn’t happen with Michael Bay.

On the red carpet for CinemaCon and in advance of Transformers: The Last Knight, Bay shared with ComicBook two instances where he was forced to put his foot down to get the movie where he wanted it.

“I was going to walk away from this franchise,” he said. “I proposed to Paramount, I said listen, ‘Every time we do one of these movies we have to roll the rock back up the hill and we need a real writers room,’ and so we had 14 great writers; we put them through Transformers school; we locked them in a room for about a month at Paramount with 10,000 images from the franchise surrounded by props and life-size Bumblebee, it just stared them in the face. They came up with a complete bible from the beginning of time until way deep into history and came up with great stories.

“(Steven) Spielberg and I gravitated to two stories and put them together. The guy who wrote Black Hawk Down (Ken Nolan) is the guy who wrote this with two guys that wrote the first Iron Man (Art Marcum and Matt Holloway) and it feels very fresh.”

Transformers: The Last Knight shatters the core myths of the Transformers franchise, and redefines what it means to be a hero. Humans and Transformers are at war, Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving our future lies buried in the secrets of the past, in the hidden history of Transformers on Earth. Saving our world falls upon the shoulders of an unlikely alliance: Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg); Bumblebee; an English Lord (Anthony Hopkins); and an Oxford Professor (Laura Haddock).

Aside from a semi-new mythos being written into the franchise, it will be uniquely shot, too.

The movie will be the first to harness the fullness of an IMAX experience.

“We are the only movie this year to shoot in real-3D, which is sad,” Bay said. “Studios are basically killing 3D because they are forcing directors to shoot and post-convert everything. They asked me obviously to post-convert and I said, ‘No, I’ll just give you a 2D movie,’ but there are not a lot of directors that make enough box office in the world to say no. So I put my foot down and said no. I said that if we’re going to do this 3D we’re going to do something that has never been done; we’re going to take two Arri 65 cameras, strap them together and make true IMAX 3D, so this is the first time in the world you will see true, real IMAX 3D.”

The cast of Transformers: The Last Knight features Wahlberg (Planet of the Apes) as Cade Yeager, Isabela Moner (100 Things To Do Before High School) as Izabella, Josh Duhamel (Life as We Know It) as Lieutenant Colonel William Lennox, John Turturro (The Big Lebowski) as Seymour Simmons, and Tyrese Gibson (Furious 7) as Robert Epps, as well as Jerrod Carmichael (Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising), Hopkins (Thor: The Dark World). The voice cast includes Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime and John Goodman (10 Cloverfield Lane) as Hound.

There comes a moment in everyone’s life when we are called upon to make a difference. In Transformers: The Last Knight, the hunted will become heroes. Heroes will become villains. Only one world will survive: theirs, or ours.

Transformers: The Last Knight opens in theaters on June 23, 2017. It currently has a 3.63-of-5 User Anticipation Rating according to the ComicBook users.