Moviefone Editorial

Tag: michael-bay

  • Six Things You Need to Know Before You See ‘Bumblebee’

    Six Things You Need to Know Before You See ‘Bumblebee’

    “Transformers” is a series that just won’t quit; no matter how poorly reviewed the films may be, they always seem to attract audiences in record numbers, thanks to a kind of scale and spectacle that it feels like almost nobody but Michael Bay is doing these days.

    But after “The Last Knight” underperformed – that is, by the franchise’s standards (earning more than $600 million worldwide) – Bay and his creative team went back to the drawing board for “Bumblebee,” not only hiring a new director for the first time but reconceiving this indefatigable property both for a new generation and an old one. With the Autobots’ plucky sidekick foregrounded for this particular installment and a collection of surprising changes implemented, it seemed appropriate to take a look at a handful of the things audiences should know before shelling out their money for a new “Transformers” film.

    1. Sixth In The Series, First In Our Hearts (And Chronologically, Too)

    After a series of films that have unfolded in a relatively straightforward timeline – notwithstanding a 65-million-years-ago preamble and some crazy business involving King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable – “Bumblebee” jumps back in time to 1987. Precisely how many scrappy teenagers the title character has befriended is unknown, but this time around Bumblebee buddies up with Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld), a tomboy who embarks on an action-packed adventure after discovering that her Volkswagen Beetle is in fact a transforming alien.

    Paramount Pictures

    2. A Beetle Reunion

    Bay’s fandom of American muscle cars turned Bumblebee’s automotive iteration into a Chevy Camaro, but for this flashback story, he is once again the Volkswagen that so many kids grew up playing with. Although he looks similar to the way the character was portrayed in Bay’s films, the design of the character – and all of the robots, for that matter – more closely adheres to their toy and animated-series silhouettes. Undoubtedly that gives Hasbro the opportunity to create new toys from a well-established line, but on film what that means is they’re slightly less of a whirling mass of pixels and more actual machines that change into robots.

    3. You’ve Never Seen a Transformers Movie Like This Before

    Though Michael Bay remains on board as a producer this time around, he passed directing duties to none other than Travis Knight, making his live-action debut with the film after working at the animation studio Laika and directing “Kubo and the Two Strings.” Knight has indicated that he wanted to foreground the relationship between Bumblebee and Charlie and make it more of a family-friendly coming of age story than the nonstop action spectaculars that Bay produced.

    4. Writer’s Room Turned Fighters Room

    After the first three “Transformers” films, Paramount and Michael Bay assembled a “writer’s room” to create an expansive and mutifaceted universe of films that would explore different characters and stories on the periphery of what had already been brought to the screen.

    Christina Hodson is one of the writers recruited, and even just looking at the promotional materials, she seems to have brought a significantly different feel to “Bumblebee” than its predecessors, perhaps most notably by creating a female heroine who is not immediately or initially defined by her, uh, “babeliness.” (She apparently did that so successfully that she’s subsequently been hired to write “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of one Harley Quinn)” and the Barbara Gordon/ Batgirl movie.) But most importantly, this is the first of these “spin-off” or alternate “Transformers” take films, which means that the future of the franchise depends on the success of its past.

    Paramount Pictures

    5. Get Ready for Some Triple Changers

    Inspired by a toy line that has always razed and reimagined its heroes and villains, the “Transformers” films have refined and updated the robots, and added iconic characters to their respective ensembles (the ever-popular Dinobots, for example).

    Triple Changers first appeared in the line’s Generation 1 with Astrotrain and Blitzwing; Blitzwing shows up here – though oddly with only the ability to transform into an F-4 Phantom – while newcomers Shatter and Dropkick offer longtime fans yet another piece of “Transformers” ephemera to fetishize as the filmmakers explore their rich mythology.

    6. It Has an Impressive Cast

    The “Transformers” franchise has always been populated with a lot of talented, high-profile names, both on screen and as voice talent. This time around, Steinfeld anchors a cast that includes John Cena (“Blockers”), Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz, and Kenneth Choi (“Wolf of Wall Street”).

    For the Transformers, Peter Cullen will reprise his role as Optimus Prime — the warm and cozy voice of robot authority for more than 30 years — while Angela Bassett and Justin Theroux play those Triple Changers.

    And finally, Dylan O’Brien (“The Maze Runner”) will voice Bumblebee, replacing those busy, charming pop culture montages that previously provided the character’s reaction to the exploding world around him.

  • New ‘Bumblebee’ Trailer Is Packed With Humor, Heart, and Transformers

    New ‘Bumblebee’ Trailer Is Packed With Humor, Heart, and Transformers

    Bumblebee
    Paramount Pictures

    The new official “Bumblebee” trailer is sweet, funny, and pretty badass. It looks promising.

    Don’t let us down!

    This “Transformers” franchise spinoff/prequel is the first movie in the series to not be directed by Michael Bay. So maybe that’s why there’s some hope out there, hope that Travis Knight might do things differently after five Bay movies.

    This new trailer does have a lot more Transformers action than the first trailer — along with some standard Sector 7 agent growling from John Cena — but the focus is still on the relationship between ‘Bee and teen Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld).

    Here’s the new trailer:

    Here’s the official synopsis:

    “Every hero has a beginning… On the run in the year 1987, Bumblebee finds refuge in a junkyard in a small Californian beach town. Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), on the cusp of turning 18 and trying to find her place in the world, discovers Bumblebee, battle-scarred and broken. When Charlie revives him, she quickly learns this is no ordinary, yellow VW bug.”

    “Bumblebee” also stars Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz, Jason Drucker, Pamela Adlon, Stephen Schneider, and Kenneth Choi, with Angela Bassett and Justin Theroux voicing Decepticons. You can watch the movie in theaters starting December 21.

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  • Eva Longoria Joins ‘Dora the Explorer’

    Eva Longoria Joins ‘Dora the Explorer’

    Pantelion Films

    The upcoming live-action retelling of beloved kids TV series “Dora the Explorer” is set to be a family affair: Eva Longoria has joined the flick as Dora’s mom.

    The Hollywood Reporter has the scoop that Longoria will be playing Eva, mother of Isabela Moner’s titular character. While the animated Nickelodeon series focused on Dora’s adventures as a young girl, this new film will pick up with our heroine as a teen, about to enter high school.

    Dora’s relationship with her parents serves as another driving plot point. Here’s the film’s official logline to explain how:

    Always the explorer, Dora quickly finds herself leading Boots (her best friend, a monkey), Diego, and a rag tag group of teens on a Goonies-esque adventure to save her parents and solve the impossible mystery behind a lost Inca civilization.

    That’s a lot of plot to pack into one film, but thankfully, James Bobin — who helmed the delightful 2011 reboot “The Muppets” — is sitting in the director’s chair. We’re cautiously optimistic that this odd-on-paper reimagining can succeed under his guidance.

    In addition to Moner and Longoria, “Dora” also stars Eugenio Derbez, Nicholas Coombe, Madeleine Madden, Adriana Barraza, and Temuera Morrison. It’s shooting now in Australia, and due in theaters on August 2, 2019.

    [via: The Hollywood Reporter]

  • Why ‘Bad Boys II’ Is the Nastiest Hollywood Blockbuster Ever

    Sony

    When “Bad Boys” was released in 1995, it was far from a sure thing.

    Budgeted at a mere $19 million, the mismatched buddy action movie starred a pair of unproven sitcom actors that the studio wasn’t keen on (Martin Lawrence and Will Smith) and was helmed by Michael Bay, a young, first-time filmmaker best known for his flashy commercials and music video work (none of which showed a particular strength for narrative storytelling). But “Bad Boys” defied the odds, making a whopping $141 million worldwide and spawning “Bad Boys II,” released 15 years ago this week.

    Looking back, the film feels somewhat ahead of its time, especially considering how many overdue, mega-budget sequels are storming the multiplexes (“Bad Boys II” arrived eight years after the original, costing $130 million more than its predecessor), but it also stands out as the nastiest, most mean-spirited blockbuster Hollywood has ever unleashed. Still.

    For some reason, even though the film has three credited writers, the runtime is a flabbergasting 147 minutes. (For those of you playing at home, this is a half-hour longer than the first film.) But what to fill such a whopping runtime? Well, as it turns out, uncontrollable filth.

    Take the opening sequence, for instance, which — after some incredibly flashy exposition involving Amsterdam drug dealers and some cartoonish Hispanic drug lords — we are inserted into, of all things, a Ku Klux Klan rally (amongst the hooded masses: a young Michael Shannon!) And Bay really goes full out — there are the robes, the burning crosses, the bucktoothed hillbillies. It’s more alarming to see in our even-more-racially-splintered 2018, but 15 years ago it was still a shock.

    The comedic payoff of this sequence, of course, is that Lawrence and Smith reveal themselves to be playing the part of white supremacists, with Smith unloading his double barrels into the baddies.

    Sony

    The bloodshed is spectacular, in the sense that it is photographed with an almost pornographic attention to detail by Bay and his cinematographer Amir Mokri, but also because the director turns each bullet hole into a spectacle. Each shot is like a gory Fourth of July fireworks display.

    This level of ultraviolence isn’t out of the ordinary if you’re watching, say, South Korean genre cinema or some extreme Japanese horror film. But in a mainstream American film that, despite its R rating, was marketed to the widest possible audience (including those too-young viewers that would be drawn to it anyway), the violence is positively shocking. And it continues throughout the rest of the movie, culminating with a shot of the villain’s exploding head that wouldn’t be out of place in a David Cronenberg movie.

    It’s not just the violence, though, that makes “Bad Boys II” a singularly mean-spirited experience. Even more egregious is the film’s threatment of women, beginning in that opening montage, when a floozy retrieves a drug lord’s handgun, accidentally firing off a shot. The drug lord (Jordi Molla), turns towards camera and utters a phrase unrepeatable on a family website.

    Women are seen as being unable to make their own decisions (as in the prolonged, mostly unnecessary subplot about Smith dating Lawrence’s adult sister) and mostly just as objects. In a scene set in an Amsterdam club, the camera glides underneath short skirts and hangs around lasciviously as the same women (donned in see-through shirts) take drugs. Later on, in a scene that goes on forever, a nude woman’s corpse is turned into a bizarre fetish object for the male characters to leer at. (Honestly, how this movie avoided an NC-17 rating is anybody’s guess.)

    Sony

    And yet the most offensive scene might be a moment when Lawrence, concerned about his teenage daughter going out on a date (the horror!), decides to intimidate her would-be suitor. He and Smith open the door, throw around the N-word and imply homosexual rape. It was a sequence that so deeply offended Roger Ebert, that he made it the crux of his one-star review, citing the scene’s “needless cruelty.” Somehow, he found it even more objectionable than the high-speed chase that involved naked bodies flying out of a hearse and exploding on the pavement below.

    It would be one thing if “Bad Boys II,” which, in addition to the N-word and F-word, makes frequent racial jabs and homophobic remarks, was mean-spirited in a singular way. But the fact is that it’s a toxic bouillabaisse of debased and morally questionable ideas, concepts, and images. It’s a scummy, oftentimes witless attempt at edginess and modernity. 15 years later, it is even nastier.

    But here’s the thing — and it really does pain me to say this — watching “Bad Boys II” is also an oftentimes transporting experience. (Bay, as a craftsman, is at the top of his game and many of the shots are downright jaw-dropping.)

    And its mean-spiritedness, while certainly a spiritual shortcoming, acts to set it apart from so much squeaky clean, homogenic Hollywood product. “Bad Boys II” is unquestionable rude, crude, and unacceptable, but it’s also something of a bad taste breakthrough, a moment when the mainstream was seized, with slick artfulness, and thrown into a cauldron of moral bankruptcy.

    It’s not for everyone. And it might not be for anyone. But it’s undeniably “Bad Boys II.”

  • The Inside Story of ‘Deep Impact’ vs. ‘Armageddon’

    It happens every couple of years, where two incredibly similar movies will come out around the same time, whether they’re about magicians, terrorists targeting the white house, or destructively erupting volcanoes.

    But perhaps the most famous — and still talked-about — tale of conceptual overlap came in the summer of 1998, when dueling films about death from above (one’s a comet, the other’s an asteroid) invaded cinemas worldwide. “Deep Impact” vs. “Armageddon.”

    But which actually came first? And which holds up better, 20 years later?

    According to a May 1998 issue of Starlog magazine (remember them?), producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck came up with the concept for “Deep Impact” sometime in the late 1970s, when they were contemplating a way to update the 1951 film “When Worlds Collide.” The producers took the concept to Steven Spielberg, who had already bought the rights to “The Hammer of God,” a novel by Arthur C. Clarke, with similar subject matter (an asteroid on a collision course with earth).

    Eventually, the filmmaker would merge the projects with a script by Bruce Joel Rubin (later re-written by Michael Tolkin). The subsequent drafts of the screenplay took it away from “When Worlds Collide” and “Hammer of God” enough that neither was credited; this left Clarke deeply unhappy, particularly since DreamWorks had used his name in promotion of the project.

    Spielberg intended to direct the project (ultimately called “Deep Impact”) himself, injecting some popcorn movie heft to his newly developed studio, but commitments to “Amistad” prevented him from making the movie in the window that he had allotted. And why was everyone in such a hurry? Because over at the Disney lot in Burbank, a suspiciously similar project was brewing.
    Years later, Rubin claimed that Disney had outright stolen the idea for the project. In the nonfiction book “Tales from the Script,” the writer says that, while taking a meeting at Disney, he spoke about the “Deep Impact” script, and noticed that the executive he was meeting with was furiously taking notes. This wouldn’t be the first time Disney had been accused of plagiarism (some accounts suggest the entire concept of Disney-MGM Studios — now Disney’s Hollywood Studios, in Orlando, Florida — was lifted entirely from discussions with Universal that Disney chief Michael Eisner had when he was still running Paramount) and it wouldn’t be the last.

    But this kind of skullduggery went on even throughout production. We spoke to someone who said that Bay told him that Bay and a confederate snuck into Paramount while the film was being edited and actually stole dailies so that the “Armageddon” production team could see what the competition was up to. Can you imagine?

    The competition continued even after “Deep Impact” was released, with Disney Studios chairman Joe Roth giving “Armageddon” an additional $3 million for even bigger visual effects sequences, to be incorporated just a few months before “Armageddon” was set to debut.
    It’s unclear where the initial idea for “Armageddon” came from, particularly since almost a dozen writers had their hands on the screenplay. But what is clear is that it came after “Deep Impact” was being worked on. It’s also very clear that Bay, deeply insecure about his own film, did some unscrupulous things to make sure that his film came out on top. And it did.

    While “Deep Impact” was more widely praised, with more nuanced performances and assured direction (by “ER” alum and frequent Spielberg collaborator Mimi Leder) and made a sizable dent in the box office, “Armageddon” was a straight up blockbuster. With a worldwide total of almost $600 million, it was the highest grossing movie (internationally) of 1998 and continued to be a major force in popular culture, immortalized by the vaulted Criterion Collection on home video. It even inspired an elaborate attraction at the Disneyland Paris’ Disney Studios Park in Europe. (The space shuttle design from the film also seems to have been used as inspiration for the Mission: Space attraction at Epcot.)

    And, truth be told, some 20 years later, “Armageddon” is the more purely pleasurable film, no matter how tumultuous (and morally compromised) the original production was.

    With bigger stars (Bruce Willis rules), bigger explosions, and bigger sentimentality. It’s easy to admire “Deep Impact,” but it’s hard to love. “Armageddon” you just want to hug.

  • DC Wants Michael Bay to Direct ‘Lobo’ Movie

    Michael BayDC has reportedly met with “Transformers” director Michael Bay to take charge of its upcoming “Lobo” movie.

    TheWrap reports that DC and Warner Bros. hopes Bay can turn what would be his first superhero film into their answer to Marvel’s “Deadpool.” In other words, a monster box-office hit. With ample use of, we assume, Bay’s trademark 360-degree hero shots.

    Lobo, to the uninitiated, is a blue, 7-foot-tall alien with more muscles than Jason Momoa. The official DC Comics site describes him as a “foul-mouthed brawler” who’s “the most brutally effective bounty hunter in the galaxy.” So, Deadpool meets Boba Fett. Got it.

    “Wonder Woman” scripter Jason Fuchs is reportedly reworking the script based on notes from Bay in hopes that the director will sign on, according to TheWrap.

    “San Andreas” director Brad Peyton was previously attached to direct “Lobo,” and before that, Guy Ritchie was on board.

    [Via TheWrap]

  • First ‘Bumblebee’ Photo With Hailee Steinfeld Teases Retro ‘Transformers’ Spinoff

    The “Transformers” franchise is traveling back to the 1980s, just with a Volkswagen Beetle instead of a DeLorean.

    “Bumblebee,” heading to theaters a year from now, is the first film in the live-action franchise to not be directed by Michael Bay. Instead, Travis Knight (“Kubo And The Two Strings”) is heading behind the wheel, so to speak, for a spinoff focused on our Autobot hero.

    Here’s the synopsis from Paramount:

    “On the run in the year 1987, Bumblebee finds refuge in a junkyard in a small Californian beach town. Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), on the cusp of turning 18 and trying to find her place in the world, discovers Bumblebee, battle-scarred and broken. When Charlie revives him, she quickly learns this is no ordinary, yellow VW bug.”

    Empire shared a new photo showing Charlie and Bumblebee:Yep, he’s back to being a bug — like the old cartoons — as opposed to the Chevy Camaro of the films.

    Travis Knight told Empire how he wants to distinguish his film from the others by Michael Bay:

    “I wanted to approach this massive, expansive franchise and really focus in on a tiny corner of the canvas. Everything I’ve tried to do at Laika [animation studio] — searching for an artful blend of darkness and light, intensity and warmth, humor and heart — I wanted to bring to the Transformers franchise.”

    The rest of the cast includes John Cena, Pamela Adlon, Stephen Schneider, and Gracie Dzienny.

    “Bumblebee” is scheduled for release on December 21, 2018, which will pit it against DC’s “Aquaman.”

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  • Megan Fox Blames Herself for ‘Transformers 3’ Firing: ‘All I Had to Do Was Apologize’

    'Transformers' Press Conference In SeoulMegan Fox compared director Michael Bay to Hitler and was too “self-righteous” to back down.

    Fox shot to fame as Mikaela Banes in Bay’s first two “Transformers” movies opposite Shia LaBeouf. She was supposed to be in the 2011 film “Transformers 3,” but then she gave a rather colorful interview to London’s Wonderland Magazine before filming. Here’s part of what she said at the time:

    “[Bay] wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he’s not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he’s so awkward, so hopelessly awkward. […] He has no social skills at all. And it’s endearing to watch him. He’s vulnerable and fragile in real life and then on set he’s a tyrant.”

    Michael Bay didn’t seem to mind what she said, but producer Steven Spielberg is not one to let a Hitler quip slide. According to Bay, “You know that Hitler thing. Steven said, fire her right now.”

    So Megan Fox was replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.”

    Fast-forward several years, and the now 31-year-old Fox is on the new cover of Cosmopolitan UK, revisiting that dark time in her life:

    “That was absolutely the low point of my career. But without – ‘that thing’, I wouldn’t have learned as quickly as I did. All I had to do was apologize – and I refused. I was so self-righteous at 23, I couldn’t see [that] it was for the greater good. I really thought I was Joan of Arc.

    It hurt me and a lot of other people. However, that darkness that descended caused enormous and brisk spiritual growth. Once I realized I [had] brought it on myself, it was an invaluable learning experience, looking back on it.”

    She has a good attitude about it. Even though she used an unfortunate comparison, you could argue the punishment was worse than the crime. Then again, being freed from the “Transformers” franchise isn’t the worst thing to happen to a person, and she eventually landed another blockbuster franchise with “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

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  • Here’s Why ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ Is a Box Office Disappointment

    “Transformers: The Last Knight” had the box office all to itself this weekend, and yet, even without any other new wide releases, it still failed to impress.

    True, most movies would kill for an opening weekend estimated at $45.3 million, or a five-day total (the movie opened Wednesday) estimated at $69.0 million. Indeed, that’s just about where pundits expected the franchise’s fifth installment to debut.

    But the “Transformers” — and director Michael “I demand things to be awesome!” Bay — have higher standards. After all, the last installment, 2014’s “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” premiered with a $100.0 million first weekend. “Last Knight” marks the lowest debut in the series’ ten-year history.

    This is more bad news for Paramount this year — the studio is in a costly slump due to such expensive flops as “Monster Trucks,” “Ghost in the Shell,” and “Baywatch” — as well as for the franchise and its director. Critics have never liked these movies, but now, everyone else seems to be getting tired of the giant-robot films, even Bay, who’s all but insisted that “Last Knight” will be his last “Transformers” movie.

    And yet, there’s reason for Paramount to celebrate (just a little) — and reason for it to go ahead with its Bumblebee spinoff due next year: Overseas box office.
    The “Transformers” movies may have seen diminishing returns in North America, but they just keep getting bigger abroad. “Age of Extinction” was the first film in the series to earn more than a billion worldwide. But while “Extinction” saw domestic earnings plummet from “Dark of the Moon’s” $352 million to $245 million, it saw foreign earnings vault from $771 million to $859 million. So the overseas take now accounts for three-quarters of the franchise’s ticket sales.

    That figure has held with the release of the new movie, which has already earned an estimated $196.2 million abroad. $123.4 million of that, or 63 percent, comes from China — which is insane. That marks the franchise’s largest opening ever in the Middle Kingdom and the fourth-biggest debut in history for a Hollywood film in China. It’s no wonder that China is now the linchpin to the success of virtually every Hollywood blockbuster.

    At a reported production cost of $217 million (before an aggressive and costly marketing spend), “Last Knight” was an expensive movie to make. But with $265.3 million earned in its first five days, the movie could find its way to profitability, once all revenue streams are accounted for — even after you account for marketing and distribution costs (more than $100 million) and the theater owners’ share of the grosses (about half).
    That worldwide success means a lot to Paramount, a studio that’s lost money in recent years. In 2016 alone, it claimed a stunning loss of $445 million, about a fourth of which came from writing off “Monster Trucks” as a flop four months before it opened. Yikes.

    Even so, despite a slate of movies that fizzled at the domestic box office in 2017, overseas grosses are slowly helping put Paramount back into the black. “Rings,” “xXx: Return of Xander Cage,” and “Baywatch” all looked like flops based on their North American earnings, but they all made a ton of money elsewhere, with somewhere between 58 and 87 percent of their sales coming from abroad. “Rings” and “xXx” ultimately earned back several times their cost in worldwide grosses, while “Baywatch” has earned back twice its cost and may well be profitable by the end of the summer.

    Reviving old franchises — and mining the vault and Viacom partners for new ones — is a priority for Paramount, which lacks many of them. So far, their current franchises are “Transformers,” “Star Trek,” and “Mission: Impossible,” all of which are aging fast. Until the studio comes up with some new ones — “Baywatch” sequel, anyone? — it’s going to have to make do with these. No wonder there are three more “Transformers” movies in the works, including Bumblebee’s spinoff.
    Even without Bay, they should make money — not just from foreign sales, but from merchandising. New Paramount chief Jim Gianopulos says he wants to make more movies based on Hasbro toys; besides “Transformers,” Hasbro playthings have also yielded the “G.I. Joe” films for Paramount, as well as the successful “Ouija” horror series at Universal. (Meanwhile, let’s all pretend that massive duds “Battleship” and “Jem and the Holograms” never happened.)

    It’s worth noting that all the other studios are using the same foreign-dependent strategy. Lots of 2017 movies that underwhelmed domestically, including Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” and Universal’s “The Mummy,” have raked it in abroad. (This is why Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise get to keep starring in movies, despite the meh response to their films in America.)

    Even this year’s biggest domestic hits, including “Beauty and the Beast,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” and “Wonder Woman,” have earned the majority of their money overseas. In fact, among the top ten domestic hits of 2017, only two, “The LEGO Batman Movie” and “Get Out,” earned more here than abroad.

    Still, it’s sort of funny that Paramount added Anthony Hopkins to the “Transformers” ensemble in “Last Knight,” as if the venerable Oscar-winning actor’s presence would bring in older or more highbrow audiences. As the scathing reviews (just 15 percent at Rotten Tomatoes), the unenthusiastic word-of-mouth (a tepid B+ from CinemaScore), and the weak domestic box office numbers suggest, “Transformers” isn’t bringing in any new fans, at least not in the U.S.

    But if you’re one of those core fans, congratulations: your fandom will be rewarded by at least three more installments in the “Transformers” universe. And if you’re an American or Canadian who’s not a fan — well, these movies weren’t made for you. Few Hollywood movies are — or will be, going forth.

  • The Scariest Part of ‘Armageddon’ Isn’t the Asteroid: Podcast

    Armageddon podcastYou won’t want to close your eyes. You won’t want to fall asleep. ‘Cause we’re talking about “Armageddon,” and you won’t want to miss a thing.

    This week, the CAN’T WAIT! crew (Tim Hayne, Rachel Horner, Phil Pirrello, and Tony Maccio) tackles the 1998 Michael Bay disasterpiece, drilling down to its core like its a Texas-sized asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Among the topics discussed: Bay’s penchant for trailer-made movies, a Michael Bay shared cinematic universe, and the problems inherent to giving screen time to an ensemble cast of roughly 500 people. Also, Tony Gilroy and J.J. Abrams were involved in the making of this movie, which raises A LOT of questions.

    Tune in next week for Rachel’s pick, “Two Weeks Notice,” in which Hugh Grant is charmingly befuddled and Sandra Bullock has diarrhea.

    Listen to CAN’T WAIT! A Movie Lover’s Podcast Episode 13: ‘Armageddon’Total runtime: 65:28

    Subscribe to the CAN’T WAIT! podcast:

    Have thoughts/feelings/feedback about the podcast? Have a movie you really, really want us to watch and talk about? Hit us up on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram with the hashtag #CANTWAIT.