Full disclosure: I love Michael Bay movies and Michael Bay himself. He was bestowed upon the movie going public with the same divine light that brought us Bruce Willis and Leonardo DiCaprio. When the first Transformers movie came out in 2007, I was as giddy as a teenager seeing their first boob. But after almost a decade, that childlike lust has not just waned, it’s reached its limit. When it was officially announced that Michael Bay will be directing Transformers 5, starring Mark Wahlberg, the entire Internet slumped its shoulders, put its head in its hands and sighed the discontented mouth noise of the emotionally bereft. As we all read the news we could only wonder: after four movies, one switch of main protagonist, and two flip flops of Michael Bay Booty Bait (patent pending), was there really a need for another Transformers movie? No. No there wasn’t. But they’re making one anyway and it’s all our goddamned fault. Here’s why.

Us And Our Goddamned Nostalgia

Hey everyone, remember when you were young and things were way more awesome and cooler than the stupid shit that kids are into these days? Remember how music was better, and TV was better, and the sun shined down upon us like we were the chosen ones and we’d never grow up and be uncool? Yeah, we all do. Then we grew up and instead of recognizing that these things were cool because we were young and discovering them for the first time while defining our own identity, we desperately wanted all of our cool shit back. That’s how this all started.

There wasn’t a clamoring for a Transformers movie, but the nostalgia index on the Internet kept getting pushed farther and farther into the “someone should exploit this” level that they eventually did. Have you ever gone back and re-watched some of these shows that hold onto your nostalgia membrane? They’re awful! But they sit in that special area of your brain that clouds your judgement and makes you remember things as awesome instead of remembering that you were eight and stupid. Hollywood knows this now and they want to exploit our rose-colored lenses by feeding us updated childhood favorites again and again.

This is our fault

Our Viral Obsessed Culture Perpetuates This Type of Story Telling

The way that information is passed around these days leads to the dumbing down of a lot of useful and provocative stories. We want things in bite sized, list formed (I know I know), hilarious, fast-paced, digestible bits that we can consume on our lunch break or on the toilet. There’s a reason that Buzzfeed used the advertising dollars from their ridiculous click bait listicles to fund more in depth (read: not as buzzworthy) investigative journalism: because we will gobble it up faster than Honey BooBoo at a buffet. But this viral nature has also infected our cinema.

Quentin Tarantino makes nuanced, character driven yet violent movies that require your attention and focus. He wins oscars for screenwriting. His movies don’t traffic in nearly the figures that the Transformers do because it’s hard to squish all of the details down into a 30 second youtube clip. It takes thought, and deference to both the history of filmmaking and storytelling to truly digest a Tarantino film. While it is arguable that Michael Bay is actually an incredibly inventive filmmaker, it’s pretty easy to sum up the plot of the Transformers movies by making explosion sounds with your mouth and smashing some action figures together. And people are just straight eating that shit up because it fits right in with that cat video they just watched, or the stupid lightsaber kid.

Damn you for this

Their Merchandising Is Second Only To Star Wars

George Lucas didn’t make a platinum coated boatload of fuck you money by making the Star Wars movies. He did it by retaining the licensing rights to toys, lunch boxes, video games and anything else that could possibly carry the franchise’s name. A multi-billion dollar movie franchise, predicated upon a toy line, is nothing but an excuse to sell merchandise. That’s why they continue to revamp and revise which new robots will be in the movies, and then never EVER talk about them again. Characters who weren’t killed, and could totally add to the plot and firepower of the next movie, simply walk off into the distance to never be heard from again. New characters make the apparent transgalactic trip to earth with zero problem in order to show up in the next movie. This happens for one reason: Toys.

Universal and Paramount will spend untold MILLIONS on advertisements, posters, franchise tie-ins and giveaways to help draw you into their real plan.These are movies that are produced in cooperation with Hasbro after all, and while your box office dollars are nice; your children’s allowance dollars are even better. New characters, new designs, new color schemes all mean new versions of toys. To hell with the plot, overarching themes, the human condition or the ramifications of a world where your appliances can kill you; you shoehorn in some shitty stereotypes because we need new toys before the holidays so that we can line our champagne filled pools with children’s money.

We let this happen

These Movies Bring In BILLIONS Of Dollars

Movies that don’t make money don’t get sequels. Movies that don’t make personal yacht money don’t get sequels with nine figure budgets (that’s this many: $200,000,000). The fact of the matter is, no matter how much you sit on your couch and dismiss these movies as the frivolous nonsense of testosterone driven explosions; they’re raking in the GDP of a small country. That’s not hyperbole, here are the actual numbers:

Transformers 1 
Budget $147 Million 
Worldwide Box Office Revenue - $709,709,780

Transformers 2
Budget $200 Million 
Worldwide Box Office Revenue - $836,303,693

Transformers 3
Budget $195 Million 
Worldwide Box Office Revenue - $1,123,794,079

Transformers 4 
Budget $210 Million 
Worldwide Box Office Revenue - $1,104,039,076

Total Budget for all four films - $752,000,000.
Total Box Office Revenue - $3,773,846,628
Total Profit - $3,021,846,628.

That’s Billion. With a giant fucking B.

Keep in mind that these movies don’t even have to be all that good to rake in that type of cash. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen—the sophomore release— was written during the 2008 Hollywood Writer’s strike; meaning that they didn’t even have a finished script when they started filming. Michael Bay just figured, fuck it, giant robots fighting? Shoot it against a green screen and we’ll fix any fuck ups in post production —and it made over Six Hundred Million Dollars. The median income in the United States is $50,000. Revenge of the Fallen—a film that made zero goddamned sense even in a world where cars turn into giant robots—made the equivalent income of 12,000 average American families. That’s a small town in Wyoming. Michael Bay made, in one poorly conceived, and even more poorly executed film, the same amount of money as a small town brings in in a year. We gave him that money. Us, reading this. You, Me, Everybody. And that was just the profits from one film.

We. Keep. Wanting. More.

There was a time, in the long long ago, that we allowed stories to end and characters to ride off into the sunset never to be bothered again. They completed their arc of redemption, or vengeance, or self discovery; were made whole again and their story was done. These days, for reasons that rhyme with honey, we simply can’t let our heroes die. Spiderman has been rebooted three times, Batman, Superman and The Hulk twice, Transformers and the X-Men once. Each time their stories have reached a commercial or logical conclusion—a point in time where we could whisper our sweet goodbyes to characters that we love—they’ve been prematurely resurrected. Foisted back out on a populace desperate to see their favorites just one more time.

We can stop this vicious cycle of abuse. This continual betrayal of both our nostalgia and movie going experience. We can show the studios that we don’t want another Transformers movie. We can tell them that Michael Bay can be so much more than a man who who smashes our childhood memories to bits as he cashes checks bigger than his reputation. He made The Rock and Armageddon for Christ's sake! He made Ben Affleck and Nicholas Cage look like stars!

Come back to us, Michael Bay ,you’re better than this.

We're all better than this