Michael Bay Says Steven Spielberg Told Him to Stop Making Transformers Movies: “I Made Too Many”

Transformers series director Michael Bay reveals executive producer Steven Spielberg recommended he stop rolling out blockbusters about the robots in disguise. The Bad Boys and Armageddon filmmaker helmed five Transformers films between 2007 and 2017, including the consecutive trilogy of Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. According to Spielberg, who executive produced with Bay, he should have stopped there. But Bay would go on to direct two more, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight. 

“I made too many of them,” Bay told Unilad UK while promoting his new movie Ambulance. “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’s five films, led by stars Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, and Mark Wahlberg, grossed a combined $4 billion globally. 2011’s Dark of the Moon and 2014’s Age of Extinction each earned more than $1 billion at the box office, but the Bay-directed franchise saw diminishing returns: The Last Knight grossed $605 million in 2017. 

Travis Knight took over for smaller-scale prequel Bumblebee, executive produced by Bay, also listed as a producer on director Steven Caple Jr.’s ’90s-set sequel Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. 

The 2007 original from Paramount Pictures and Spielberg’s DreamWorks was “scary,” Bay said, explaining, “It was technology we didn’t know would work, and then it became very successful.”

“It was the first time digital effects were that highly reflective, so it broke a lot of new ground,” Bay said of the state-of-the-art CGI bringing to life the Autobots and Decepticons. “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.”

Paramount Pictures has scheduled Transformers: Rise of the Beasts to open in theaters on June 9, 2023. 

Photo: Dave Allocca/Getty Images