Michael Bay

With Michael Bay hanging up his transforming robot spurs after this summer’s Transformers: The Last Knight, a lot seems to be hinging on the success of his final outing. Paramount already has plans to create a Transformers cinematic universe with a series of movies based on individual characters from the series; should Bay’s final film trip coming out of the gate, it could throw a wrench into a pretty expensive set of gears. And while no one would confuse me with the world’s biggest Transformers fan, the hint of time travel and goofy historical retconning at least makes this one seem kind of fun.

It’s big, it’s loud, it’s here: feast your eyes on the first trailer for Transformers: The Last Knight! After a truly weird production period that involved dragons, King Arthur, igniting the ire of British vets by dressing up Winston Churchill’s childhood home as a Nazi headquarters, and the usual level of Bayhem, we finally have our very first glimpse of the fifth installment in the inexplicably popular franchise.

When you think Transformers, your mind probably doesn’t immediately go to places like medieval times (the era, not the restaurant) or Stonehenge, but that’s definitely where Michael Bay is taking us for The Last Knight. While we wait for the first official trailer to drop later this week, Paramount has released a new IMAX featurette that reveals a little bit of footage from the upcoming sequel — and it is bananas.

Back in June, Michael Bay unveiled the new and improved Bumblebee from ‘Transformers: The Last Knight.’ The black and yellow Autobot swapped out a 2014 Camero for a 2016 Camero custom job, and now we have a new look at the car in action.

It’s a matter of public record that anyone who came of age during the ’90s has a soft spot for The Rock. Not only did the film convince an entire generation that Nicolas Cage was a viable action star — thereby ensuring the existence of movies like Con Air, Face / Off, and yes, even Snake Eyes — but it also cemented director Michael Bay’s reputation as one of the great action filmmakers of his generation, Transformers be damned.

What, you didn’t think Michael Bay would actually give his new Transformers sequel a silly title like Transformers 5, did you? Of course not. As with its predecessors, the next installment in the franchise has been given a lengthier, more regal name, and is now officially titled Transformers: The Last Knight. Arise, Sir Optimus Prime.

Well, if nothing else, at least we now know Transformers 5 will look really, really good. John Wick cinematographer John Sela has been hired to shoot Michael Bay’s upcoming mega-robot blockbuster sequel — unfortunately for us (but fortunately for him), Keanu Reeves will not be making an appearance, but rest assured that he will be with Michael Bay in spirit, hopefully using his unique brand of zen to guide Bay through this difficult process

If you didn’t like Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, just know that it could’ve been a lot worse. An early draft of the script turned the Turtles into aliens from another dimension and Shredder was turned into Colonel Schroeder, a secret alien who can grow blades. That’s just one of the facts packed into the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies, which gets totally tubular with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

Since Michael Bay decided to make Transformers: Age of Extinction his last directorial outing with the franchise, it’s been unclear just where the series is heading. We’d heard talk of Mark Wahlberg returning to continue the storyline that began with last summer’s film, but little else since then. Taking a cue from Disney’s Star Wars plans (along with every other major studio’s “expanded universe” attempts), Paramount has hired Akiva Goldsman to create a “writers room” and brainstorm new sequel and spinoff ideas.

Woe be unto humanity if teenagers discover time travel. That’s the main takeaway from the entertaining new found-footage thriller ‘Project Almanac,’ in which a quintet of adolescents find a time machine, and do exactly what a bunch of adolescents would do if they found a time machine: Party, prank, and screw around with no thought to the consequences of their actions. These kids know and cite ‘Looper’ and ‘The Terminator,’ but the movie they should have paid attention to was ‘The Butterfly Effect,’ because they seem caught off-guard when their innocent misadventures in the timestream begin to ripple out in dangerous ways.