Movies
| This article is about the real-world Transformers movies. For fictional films, see Film. |
The history of Transformers movies is... certainly interesting, if kind of threadbare up until the live-action movies made their impact.
History
The Transformers: The Movie (1986)
With The Transformers riding high as a top-selling toyline with a ratings-grabbing cartoon, it was a shoe-in to get one of several Hasbro-funded toy-selling movies to be produced in the mid-Eighties. The Transformers: The Movie was accompanied by a big media blitz, and designed to bring Transformers into a new era, both fictionally and financially.
Unfortunately, it didn't do quite what Hasbro had hoped. The movie was critically panned, and kids were horrified at the deaths of many of their favorite characters (since their toys were no longer being sold), with hundreds of letters from kids (and parents) upset over the death of Optimus Prime in particular. And while no actual production budget has been uncovered to gauge profit or loss, Transformers was out-performed by most every animated kids' feature that year. Hasbro scrapped their plans to release their G.I. Joe movie in theaters, based on the poor performance and reception of Transformers, going straight to home video (and also hastily rewriting the intended death of Duke). So we can assume it didn't do too well.
The Movie was actually skipped in Japan, with its events being told in super-condensed form in the pages of TV Magazine to catch kids up on where the likes of Optimus and Megatron had gone. The Movie was eventually released in Japan, on home video, in 1989.
Obviously, nostalgia has softened the reception of The Movie, which has since been re-released in home formats many, many times, and even been brought back to theaters for special showings.
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Japanese Beast Wars theater releases (1998~1999)
With Beast Wars doing well in Japan, Takara tried to capitalize on that by producing quick, cheap theater-release "movies" which were mainly anthologies, and mostly previously-produced Beast Wars material that had not yet been seen in Japan. However, there is one bit of completely original animation in the first of these "movies", which featured the heavily-promoted team-up of Lio Convoy (from Beast Wars II) with the original Beast Wars's Optimus Primal.
How well these did financially is unknown, but given the general lackluster sales of Beast Wars II toys, odds are they didn't do great.
The live-action film series (2007~current)
Directed by explosion auteur Michael Bay, with Executive Producer Steven Spielberg, Transformers thundered onto screens in July of 2007.
And it was a literally booming success, bigger than anything anyone had predicted. Though critical reception was hardly glowing (most of the positive reviews openly admitted it was a dumb-fun popcorn flick), it was a box-office-record-shattering juggernaut across the globe, it pushed the limits of CG special effects and inspired other effects-heavy films to push the tech more, and it moved a ton of toys, funding Hasbro and TakaraTomy's various Transformers side-projects that would have been unfeasible before then. Two more movies followed, neither of which got even the middling critical praise of the first, but continued to rake in the box-office dollars on an incredible scale.
Bay was set to leave the franchise following the third movie, Dark of the Moon, but Paramount kept driving up to his place with dumptrucks full of money, promising to fund his pet projects if he stayed on, so he did. The following two Bay-helmed films were nigh-universally panned critically, but it wasn't until the fifth film, The Last Knight, that Paramount finally began to see diminishing financial returns. While Paramount didn't want to kill this cash cow after one failed film, they were acutely aware that something needed to change going forward.
2018's Bumblebee marks a turning point in the film series on many levels. Bay stepped aside as director, with animation director Travis Knight taking the duty. (Bay would remain a Producer, with his production house heavily involved in the film.) The original version of the film was a prequel to the previous movies, but re-shoots and new sequences were added in mid-development to make it more... ambiguous, "working" as either a prequel or a reboot as needed, depending on audience reception. (As for continuity issues, well, it's not like the prior movies didn't play fast and loose with the details.) With a lighter, more kid-friendly tone, a reduced amount of violence and mayhem, and a lean into more "traditional"-looking Transformers, the movie did well critically, and did squeak into a decent profit (especially thanks to overseas ticket sales). Following this performance, it has been stated that Bumblebee would be the template from which future films would follow.
Just what that means, exactly, is still unknown for now.
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Transformers Prime: Predacons Rising (2013)
Following the end of the Transformers: Prime cartoon, the series was capped off with a TV movie event airing on Hub Network, bringing the Prime series to a pretty conclusive end, and setting the stage for the follow-up series. Though the Predacon element of the story is not exactly as significant as the movie's title would suggest.
Hasbro made a pretty big deal out of this TV movie, with a significant amount of advertising, a home video release a few days after its original airing, and even a Target-exclusive range of Predacons Rising toys.
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