If you’v ever watched a movie and thought “wow there were way too many explosions in that”, chances are it was a Michael Bay film. Michael Bay is notorious for creating films that have little to no plot and exist just to have crazy action sequences where either robots/ humans fight or a beautiful girl runs in slow motion. This is pretty entertaining the first time around, but once the sequels begin to be churned out annually it becomes ridiculous. Take Bay’s Transformers series for example. Bay achieved great success with the first two movies of this series, yielding an impressing gross at the box offices and getting decent reviews, but he didn’t stop there. Despite Meghan Fox declining to return for a third movie Bay went ahead and made a third film that introduced a new female love interest for Shia Laboeuf out of nowhere and pity the new couple against a legion of killer alien robots yet again. Many were sure that this third film would put the Transformers’ series to rest but Bay disproved this theory when, much to the dismay of everyone, he announced that the new Transformers film (Transformers 4 Age of Extinction) would mark the beginning of a new Transformers trilogy. This has turned Michael Bay into the worse kind of director because he has become only interested in churning out sequels instead of creating new and original content. His other project of the summer, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, also is a recycling of a past franchise and even features Meghan Fox again. Bay has fallen into the classic Blockbuster tradition of making movies simply to profit rather than come up with a story that is unique and worthy of being told. Bay isn’t the only one guilty of bringing a film series back from the dead for a profit. This summer alone features The Amazing spiderman 2 (Reboot and a sequel), X-men Days of Future Past (Sequel), The Purge: Anarchy (Sequel), and How to Train Your Dragon 2 (sequel) just to name a few. Hollywood has become reliant on franchise superhero movie and Action film sequels and it’s gotten to the point that these films are almost the only movies that you can find in theaters. Sequels and franchise films are a necessary staple of Hollywood that are needed to keep Studios afloat and support smaller productions, but I think that filmmakers need to start to recognize when they’ve exhausted a series because this only results in a disinterest by fans and ultimately a loss of money by the studio. So let’s keep those unique, well written films flowing and cut back on unnecessary sequels. If Tinsel Town does this I think they can will churn out some pretty great cinematic works and create even more of a competition come oscar season.
