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SYFY WIRE Steven Spielberg

Michael Bay says Steven Spielberg told him to quit making Transformers movies

Regrettably, he made two more. 

By Vanessa Armstrong
Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg

Would you ignore filmmaking advice from Steven Spielberg? Michael Bay did — and we have Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight because of it. 

Bay has apparently since regretted ignoring Spielberg’s advice — five Michael Bay-directed Transformers movies is two too many, even for Michael Bay. 

“I made too many of them,” Bay told Unilad UK about the mega-franchise based on the popular Hasbro toys that transform from vehicles (primarily) into robots. “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.”

Fun to do or not, Bay has finally bowed out of the franchise’s director’s chair, but is still involved as a producer for the upcoming Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which is helmed by Steven Caple Jr. and inspired by Beast Wars, a popular late ‘90s cartoon series where humanoid robot aliens transform into creatures (beasts, if you will) instead of cars. Speilberg is also an executive producer for Rise of the Beasts and the Transformers movies that came before it. 

While Bay is apparently done directing Transformers films, he's far from done directing other high-octane, hold-on-to-the-edge-of-your-seat, mega-action flicks. The most recent one is Ambulance, starring Jake Gyllenhall, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Eiza González. That film crashes into your eyeballs on April 8, while Rise of the Beasts is currently expected to roar into theaters on June 9, 2023.