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'Transformers' Live Action Movie from DreamWorks?
mr_don't writes "Apprently, CNN is reporting that Dreamworks might be in talks with Michael Bay (who directed the bomb Pearl Harbor) to direct a live action Transformers movie. The article says: A November 17, 2006, release date has been set. Bay's credits include the two "Bad Boys" movies, "Pearl Harbor," "Armageddon" and "The Rock." Well, as a child of the 80's I must admit I am interested, but could the movie be directed by Robert Rodriguez instead?"
Why would anyone watch a movie about a giant spool of wire?
I hope Bender gets to play Optimus Prime.
He could be made for that role.
could the movie be directed by Robert Rodriguez instead?
I dunno, Michael Bay could be more than meets the eye...
Looks like someone is inspired...
After I saw this movie I knew this was going to happen. I just hope it doesn't suck, I'm damn protective of my transformers I had as a kid.
There is a rage in me to defy the order of the stars, despite their pretty patterns.
Kind of. Transfans have known this to be in the works for a while.. the original projected release date was 2005.. though I doubt that now.
I'm mixed on this.. if its done right, it could be truly awesome...
P.S. Pearl Harbor wasn't a "bomb"--it was a bad movie that did very well at the box office. To suggest that it was a bomb is just plain silly. Pearl Harbor was a plodding movie with a trite script and stilted acting that performed extremely well at the box office thanks to aggressive marketing and some pretty good technical work. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean you can go around claiming it failed miserably.)
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
This movie is going to be fucking expensive. As in reallly really goddamn expensive.
I expect a lot of explosions. Terrible dialogue. An incredibly bad mixture of CGI and reality, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the end of Air Force One.
All in all, this is a silly prospect. Shouldn't they be working on more interesting things? I'd suggest something but the news of a Transformers live action movie (which isn't really "new news") has left me incapable of thinking on an intelligible level.
schild
editor, f13.net
Recently here in the UK there's been some car commercial (don't know which brand) with a car which transforms into a dancing transformers style robot. It looked so cool that I knew that someone had to exploit it for a movie, yay!
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
After Sin City, I hope to hell that all movies from now on are directed by Robert Rodriguez. And they should all star Carla Gugino as the closed-mouthed, naked lesbian.
Michael Bay? Too bad it won't be Lucas. It would crank up the Unintentional Comedy Scale (TM) to 11 to see the actors being more mechanical than the robots.
"It's difficult to meditate on amphetamines." - Joe Walsh
So, based on that resume, we can expect the following:
This will be the most incredible movie, EVER!
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
-- dR.fuZZo
20 years ago, transformers would have been described as giant robots that transform into other things. Now CNN says they 'morph', depite the face that their name contains in it the word used to describe their shape-changing. What's worse is that the word 'morph' became popular because of the terminator in T-2, where it's used to describe something noticably different from what the transformers do.
I'll never understand the media.
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
This has been circulating the net for MONTHS. If you visit any of the transformer sites you can see that they've known about this for a while.
o vie.html
http://www.transformerland.com/transformers-the-m
Why do I say it's been around for months? Because they have already secured the voice of the ORIGINAL Optimus Prime! Not that crappy one on the new cartoons, the ORIGNAL voice. The TRUE voice of Prime !
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Will they update Shockwave? Boomboxes are soooooo 80's...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
In case you hadn't heard, Robert Rodriguez probably won't be doing many major-studio pictures any time soon. His decision to share directing credit with Frank Miller (and, to a certain extent, Tarantino) forced him to drop out of the Director's Guild of America.
And AFAIK, it works kind of like a union thing, the major studios only hiring directors from the DGA.
Rodriguez will no doubt have little trouble finding work... but expect it to be via indie studios.
Optium s Prime has died of prostate cancer. Perhaps our Autobot heroes will wear blue ribbons for him.
sulli
RTFJ.
From boxofficemojo.com this is the breakdown:
Pearl Harbor:
Production Budget: $140 million
Est. Marketing Costs: $70 million
Domestic gross: $198,542,554 (44.2%)
+ Overseas gross: $250,678,391 (55.8%)
-----------------
= Worldwide gross: $449,220,945
So... it cost $210 million to make and market the film, it took in $450 million from the box office ALONE (not including the millions that selling tv rights brings, DVD/VHS sales, pay-per-view spots), and I'm sure the producers are really crying about this "bomb" - crying all the way to the bank...
...Michael Bay for the pitiful excuse of a movie Pearl Harbor turned out to be. I blame Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett for sucking so bad at acting. For this one need only look to the casting director. Michael Bay is good at directing pure adrenaline fueled action sequences and he'd done three that in my opinion are tough to top; 1) the attack sequence of Pearl Harbor in Pearl Harbor, 2) the car chase between the H1 and teh Ferrari in The Rock, and 3) the F-18 approach/ bombing of Alcatraz in The Rock. Keeping in mind that The Rock never aspired to be the next Citizen Kane, I'd even go as far as to say that it was a pretty decent action movie.
You're all missing the real issue here.
The submitter used a colon after a verb; clearly, this is the more important issue at hand.
Dude, if you are going to rip someone's lyrics, at least give the source. This fine song is called The End of an Act from the Team America World Police soundtrack. Highly recommend it if you want to laugh your ass off.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
The title's more than a little misleading as well. I thought everyone had known about the movie since the dawn of time - the only news here is the speculation about the director.
For the sake of consistency, perhaps we could rewrite the rest of the article headlines: "Sun's Schwartz Attacks GPL" becomes "Jonathan Schwartz is President of Sun Micro?", "Star Wars Fans in Line... at the Wrong Theater" becomes "New Star Wars movie to be released?" and so on.
I assume I'm not alone in thinking the plot will be:
The TV series followed a variation of that plot every time. Personally, I always thought it sucked when I was a kid.
The only people that would have known about it are the kind of guys that would stand in line for a Star Wars movie a month before it opens... at the wrong theater.
I mean hell, I watched Transformers as a kid and loved it, but why on earth do you assume a 30 year old man would keep up on a cartoon, much less that it's apparently going to be made into a live action movie? That was news to me. How the heck are they going to do live-action robots transforming... lots of CGI?
That's because the original Transformers was really just a 22 minute advertisement for a cool toy line. There was only just enough actual plot to keep things moving. And it wasn't always that coherent. The CGI ones, while also being about the marketing, actually did have a strong plot in their own right.
Of course, that's just my opinion.
I'm sorry, his treatment of Sin City may be nice, but it's because Miller already did the storyboards for him. Anyone who sat through all three Spy Kids movies in the theatres (with my nephew) can give you about 5000 reasons to distrust his direction.
PEARL HARBOR
domestic: $198,542,554
international: $250,678,391
worldwide: $449,220,945
A healthy profit. the numbers don't even include dvd sales. Most blockbusters are now designed to break even domestically and thrive internationally. DVD sales almost always trump box office anyway. So the film turned a healthy profit (www.boxofficemojo.com if you want more numbers).
un burrito me trampeó.
A live action Transformes movie would be pointlessly expensive and lame.
They would be better off bringing back the original Transformers series using modern animation, and targeting it as scifi for adults rather than a silly cartoon for kids.
The original US Transformers generation 1 series had a more personal, emotional, sci-fi aspect to it than do the modern shows like Transformers Armageddon. Granted, it had its 80's cheese factor (like, how many oil rig workers do you know who wear hard hats all the time on land and write touchy-feely entries in their diary every day?) But it also had better-written dialog and stories that were delivered with a more serious and measured touch.
The newer shows have better animation and dropped the corny 80's feel, but in the process picked up the corny 90's feel and all the horrible attributes of those ridiculous american-anime shows like YuGiOh and DragonballZ: terrible dialog spoken too fast and characters who do nothing but boast stupidly at each other constantly about their superior fighting powers like it's a pissing contest.
If they would just return to the original writing, characters, and story, but do it all using modern animation (maybe CGI), and target it more as scifi for the 20+ crowd instead of as cartoons for kids, then I think they'd really have something.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I'm wondering if they'd make the following adjustments to the Transformers characters to really make the whole movie more "realistic" and proper to the 21st century:
IronChefMorimoto
You know, it could still be really cool and quite inexpensive...
...if they made it something like this!
plus explosions of course.
oh yes.
New! From the director who brought you Pearl Harbor and the screenwriter who brought you Catwoman! It's....your childhood being beaten with a baseball bat. Sigh.
-A
I expect a lot of explosions. Terrible dialogue. An incredibly bad mixture of CGI and reality, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the end of Air Force One.
here's the pitch clip that was shown by Dreamworks during the recent discussion with Michael Bay. apparently the studio want the film to be very different from Bay's style, which is good.
" How the heck are they going to do live-action robots transforming... lots of CGI?"
Precisely. From an fx point of view, it's more than plausible. Not only have commercials featured this, but some ameteurs have pulled it off as well.
I think you'd be surprised, though, at how many people are Transformers fans today. I recently visited an FX studio and was shocked at how many Transformers models they had posed around their cubes. (next to LotR figurines...) There are also quite a few people wearing autobot/decepticon insignias in various forms. (Hats, t-shirts, bumper stickers...)
I think a LOT of people would like to see a live-action transformers movie. Unfortunately, it would be VERY easy for the director to really fudge it up. The animated Transformers movie from the mid-eighties showed a glimpse of being 'more grown up'. (main characters dying, swearing, etc...) For the people I'm thinking of, it'd be great if they did something more matrue and sci-fi. They've got a great mythos to draw from, but those tards are quite likely going to try to appeal to kids. (Inspector Gadget, anyone? )
So, yeah, expect a lot of news about it followed by moaning and groaning.
"Derp de derp."
That is why we see movies like Transformers or Doom being made. If Sin City does well and makes a lot of money. I don't think a movie studio is going to give two shits if the director is in a union or not. If they can use him to make money, they will try to.
If they want Rodriguez, the union is not going to stop them.
I do admit that there are people out there that are more interested in making a good movie then money. Although, even when I rent "Finding Neverland" I'm still __FORCED__ to watch a commercial for a Chevrolet Montana Mini Van if i want to watch the movie.
Now, please do not reply how they are not actually coming to my house and tieing me down to the couch to watch it. If they do not let you fast forward or skip beyond a commercial, there intention is to make you watch it.
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
Somebody didn't see the full length Transformers:The Movie with Orson Wells as Unicron. Although it was rated PG in 1987 I bet it would pull a PG 13 rating if released tomorrow. Besides, Transformers was a comic book before a hit cartoon. According to IGN Film Force Spielberg himself will be producing it and he seems to be a fan of the original comic book series. http://filmforce.ign.com/transformers/
Love, Stalfros All the other girls are the stars, you are the Northern Lights. - Josh Ritter
Bah weep granah weep ninni bong
Welcome to last summer. The official announcement made waves last August for crying out loud.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
> the original projected release date was 2005
Not quite. The projected release date has always been 2006. 2005 was just a date picked by the fans to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the first movie. On the web forum, Don Murphy mentions they were shooting for a summer 2006 release. More information on the movie can be found on the TF - The Movie roundup page. If the first movie is successful, they plan for Unicron to make an appearance in the third one.
Though many people do not realise it, over 500 episodes of Transformers have been made in their various incarnations.
Here is a brief rundown of the various Transformer shows that have aired in the last 20 years.
American shows
Transformers Generation 1 TV show (American written show, set during 1985-86 and 2005-06)
2) Transformers Generation 2 TV show (modified version of the G1 series that added an annoying 3D space cube animation.
Japanese only series
Transformers: Headmasters (Japanese). Available as an official or partial fandub.
Transformers: Masterforce (Japanese). Available in official dub or sub-titled versions.
Transformers Victory (Japanese series) Available as an official dub, fan dub, or subtitled.
Transformers Zone (Japanese). Available in subtitled or dubbed versions.
Though transforming robots remained popular in the East, the Transformers line was 'rested' for a few years.
The Beast Era
In 1996 the toy line was relaunched. After the disappointing sales of the Generation 2 series, vehicle modes were abandoned and animal forms introduced. Optimus Primal transformed into a gorilla and Megatron became a dinosaur. The Beast era was set years after the original series 300-1000 years, depending upon your source) and introduced two new factions - the Maximals and Predacons.
Beast Wars - The Autobots and Decepticons are gone and the Maximals and Predacons have made peace. This peace is broken by Megatron (a namesake, not the original), who travels back in time in an attempt to change the course of history. In most episodes he is thwarted by Optimus Primal and a small band of Maximals. The animation shows its age, but it is probably the most intelligently written TF show made (season 2, in particular).
Beast Machines - The Beast Wars are over and the Maximals return to Cybertron. They find that Megatron has captured the sparks (soul) of every Transformer on the planet and created an army of mindless drones called Vehicons. Best remembered for the strong religious overtones, huge explosions and scenes of the Maximals running away.
Japanese Beast series
While the US got the second and third season of Beast Wars, Japan received two spin-off series that focused upon other planets.
Beast Wars 2 (Japanese). Leo Convoy (lion) Vs Galvatron (dragon).
Beast Wars Neo (Japanese) - The Maximal leader, Big Convoy (a wooly mammoth) faces against the evil Magmatron. Unlike earlier Convoy/Prime toys, Big Convoy has a removable matrix in his chest.
Autobots and Decepticons return
Hasbro's initial plan was to create a followup to the Beast Machines series called Transtech. This would feature vehicle TFs with animal moulding. However, it was later abandoned and Hasbro made a deal