Love them or hate them, Michael Bay’s Transformers movies delivered big box office returns when he brought the robots in disguise to screens for the first time in live-action back in 2007. However it seems that Bay was given the impression that movie was not going to go down well with audiences after the first test screening. While it seems ridiculous now to think that Transformers, or its sequels, could have flopped, it seems that when asking an adult at that first screening how they liked the movie, the response was not great.Bay recently spoke to Screen Rant ahead his new movie Ambulance, which opens this weekend and stars Jake Gyllenhall, Eliza Gonzalez and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and one of the subjects that came up revolved around the Transformers franchise, one of the biggest selling movie franchises in history. While recalling his initial doubts over the first movie in the series, Bay said:
“I'm telling you, here's a little trick. When directors go pre-screen their movies, we're testing them, you see what [audiences] feel and whatnot, and I've got the sound thing there, you want to throw up. Every director wants to throw up the first time a big audience is looking at that thing. And you'll see people walking down slowly in the test, and you want to grab them, 'No, no, no. Hang on. There's a big scene. If you miss this scene, you're going to miss the whole thing.'"
Bay continued:
"So it's intense, like Transformers... So two houses, 400 people in each house, starting 15 minutes difference or something like that. I'm now watching it with a whole bunch of families and kids, and I'm like, 'Okay, dumb robot movie. Oh my God. It's just a kids' movie. Oh, man. Oh, what did I do?' It gets a huge score, and it was unfinished. Then I go to the next theater, and I've got the sound thing and there's an empty seat and there's a guy, whatever. This is more of the adult kind of room, and I look to the guy and I [ask], 'Do you like this movie?' And he goes, '[meh hand motion].' And I'm like, 'Oh, this is terrible. I just made a terrible movie.' Whatever. Huge matching score, like a 94. That's a spectacular movie score."
Transformers Surpassed All Expectation And Stood Its Ground To Be One Of The Biggest Movies of the Year
Although we seem to have been robbed of big summer blockbusters for the last couple of years, back in 2007 you couldn’t get away from them. Along with Transformers, big sequels like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Shrek the Third and Spider-Man 3 were all released, making it a tough year at the top of the box office. Yet, despite that small wobble by Bay, Transformers ended up being the third highest grossing domestic movie of the year, only just being beaten by Spider-Man 3 and Shrek the Third.
With a new Transformers movie heading into theaters next year, it will add to the total $4.8 billion grossed by the franchise so far from the six movies released. With the franchise being owned by Paramount, who are looking to expand further on their properties for Paramount+, the upcoming Rise of the Beasts movie is certainly not going to be the last time we see the Transformers on screen either.