By now you may have seen the commercials for Pain and Gain, Michael Bay’s dark comedy about two gym rat muscle heads up to no good.
Although this is supposed to be a smaller Bay flick, you know the guy can’t do anything small, and the trailer has many of the ear marks of his work: Slick cinematography, explosions and testosterone oozing out of every scene.
You probably also know that Bay’s next opus is going to be Transformers 4, which is starring Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg is headlining Pain and Gain with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Bay recently gave a recent update on T4 via Collider and Forbes. Now remember, Bay changes his mind a lot, so who knows how fast he’ll deny everything he just said, so you may want to read this one quickly…
Although it’s hard to imagine a Transformers movie being small, Bay said that he’s going to be “starting off smaller” with the next film, which will be the first in a trilogy. Yes, there will eventually be six Transformers films, just like Star Wars before we learned there will be three more in the series.
Bay also said, “To freshen the franchise we’ve redesigned everything from top to bottom. The history of the first three movies is still there, we start four years later and there’s a reason why we’re meeting a new cast.”
Now for those who are worried the Transformers are going to look completely different, Bay promised, “We keep the Transformers the way they were…There’s a reason the Transformers are redesigned. We’re trying to broaden the franchise and give it more places to go.”
It’s also been reported there’s going to be new Transformers robots in the film to help sell more toys. Although the last Transformers made $1.1 billion world-wide, the toys didn’t do as well, primarily because the fans have the classic characters already. New machines will mean new toys to add to the collection.
Finally, Bay emphasized that this is not the dreaded R word: reboot. Whatever shape the next installment ultimately takes, we’ll find out when Transformers 4 hits theaters on June 27, 2014.
