Michael Bay’s Transformers, the first one that brought Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime in a live-action setting, was released in 2007. The film’s story was met with mixed reviews, but its groundbreaking work on visual effects, further empowered by the music score and action, made it a commercial hit, earning $700M+ in worldwide gross. The film’s popularity among young masses, especially in the international market, led to two sequels, Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon, both gaining lesser and lesser critical reception than the first film. Despite that, the franchise stood tall and made billions; however, at the cost of people belittling Michael Bay for duping the Transformers’ legacy into sloppy plots, incomprehensible continuation, and diminishing significance of the characters. But the director has now revealed that he has his own regrets about continuing the franchise way longer than he should have.

In an interview with Unilad UK, where he was promoting his upcoming action-thriller Ambulance, Bay revealed how legendary director Steven Spielberg once advised him to stop making Transformers after Dark of the Moon. Bay 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.

Spielberg Was Right to Ask Michael Bay ‘To Stop’

Steven Spielberg was one of the crucial anchors of the franchise. The legendary director has been an executive producer on the franchise and is continuing his partnership with the studio on the upcoming films.

Michael Bay’s Revenge of the Fallen was met with a worldwide negative reception, but the film’s business returns gave the studio enough motivation to put their faith in Bay again. His Dark of the Moon, though not perfect, was fairly managed and was definitely an improvement over the previous one. Spielberg’s advice was perfect at the time, which would have given Bay a respectable farewell from the franchise. The third film had also completed the arc of its central human characters and could have become a satisfactory conclusion to the franchise.

But Bay returned for Age of Extinction, a sloppy continuation of the original trilogy where Autobots are suddenly declared enemies, hence throwing the Transformers Series into a pool of bad reviews. Eventually, Bay’s stint of commercial success with Transformers also came to an end with the loss-making fifth film, The Last Knight, which will be of no remembrance when the franchise is talked about.

Bay has taken a departure from the franchise, which was continued by a Travis Knight-directed spin-off, Bumblebee, which the studio declared as a reboot of Bay’s series in retrospect. Bumblebee will be followed by Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. As for Bay, he continues to give action blockbusters, with his previous film 6 Underground receiving record viewership on Netflix. His next, Ambulance, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, was released on March 20 to positive reviews.