Michael Bay

If I had to pick the most egregious example of product placement ever, I would nominate the scene from Transformers: Age of Extinction, when the entire movie stops to examine the wreckage of a crash involving an alien spaceship and a Bud Light truck. The camera pans across a street littered with Bud Light bottles; then Mark Wahlberg picks one up, cracks it open, and takes a healthy swig. And while he’s shilling beer, there’s a second product placement in the background; just over his shoulder, very much in focus, is a giant Goodyear Tires sign.

For all intents and purposes, every sign points to Michael Bay and the Transformers series going their separate ways after The Last Knight. Bay even wrote a goodbye letter to the franchise thanking everyone involved for five movies’ worth of explosions, robots fighting each other, and female characters introduced from the legs up. But there’s one person who thinks he might be faking it.

Actually, Optimus Prime Has Always Been a Total Jerk

There is so much going on in this international trailer for Transformers: The Last Knight that I can hardly begin to imagine how bananas Michael Bay’s latest sequel will actually be when it hits theaters this month. It may not be over three hours long (as was erroneously reported last week), but given just how much story is happening here, that runtime doesn’t seem all that crazy. This movie just looks real extra.

Transformers: The Last Knight is poised to redefine the paradigm of Transformers movies — that is, if anyone’s still following it at this point. The Transformers have been coming to Earth for centuries, even millennia, but what does it MEAN? Sir Anthony Hopkins has some ideas, which hopefully he will finally share in the actual movie, because all of this very mysterious marketing has been just that: very mysterious.

With the recent announcement that Transformers: The Last Knight would be hitting theaters two days earlier  —  moving from Friday, June 23 to Wednesday, June 21  —  fans are closer than ever to seeing their favorite Autobots (and humans) throw down against a reluctantly evil Optimus Prime. This is the summer of heel turns by beloved franchise characters; first we saw Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto betray his family in The Fate of the Furious, and now we’re counting down the days until Optimus Prime stabs Bumblebee in the face. Rough summer for heroes, it would seem.

Word has gone around that The Last Knight will be the last Transformers movie for Michael Bay, and for a director this enamored with his franchise, it’s gotta be a little bittersweet. Today, Bay posted an open letter to his crew, his writers’ room, and his fans to say goodbye and to tell us all how much he loves this series and how much he hopes we do too.

Transformers: The Last Knight, the latest in the Hasbro franchise, has been in production for a while, but Michael Bay and co. have mostly kept all plot details under wraps. One rumor made its way to the surface a few months ago, but it wasn't until today that it was pretty much confirmed. This could get a little spoiler-y, so proceed at your own risk.

Despite regular photo updates from Michael Bay, we still don’t know much about the plot for Transformers: The Last Knight. We do know that the next installment in the franchise features some new and returning faces — both human and bot — and…that’s about it. But the first official poster for the upcoming sequel may offer a clue — kind of. Sort of. Well, it involves dragons, apparently.

Following last week’s reveal of Bumblebee’s slick new wheels, Michael Bay has shared another one of the vehicle upgrades from Transformers: The Last Knight. It looks like the Autobots won’t be the only ones receiving makeovers, as the latest photo depicts a familiar Decepticon sporting a new look.

I like that this video explains who the Ninja Turtles are, for the benefit of those people who have been living in a cave (or maybe a sewer) since the late 1980s and have somehow avoided one of the six previous movies, five television shows, hundreds of toys, comics, and video games about these characters. “Oh Donatello is the purple one, ohhhhhh. For the last 30 years, I thought that was Raphael! My bad.”

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!