This past weekend, Paramount’s Transformers: The Last Knight grossed $2.84 million, bringing its domestic cume to a dismal $124.95m after 26 days of release. The Michael Bay film will barely climb over the $130m mark – a crushing blow for Paramount, a studio who haven’t had a hit since last November’s Arrival.
Why did Transformers, a series known for pulling huge numbers in the face of critical derision, finally crash? It isn’t a difficult question to answer: when a year is stacked with tentpole fare, and much of it is high-quality, the value of a franchise can only take it so far when said franchise’s installment isn’t well-received. The Last Knight will have a final gross -47% the total of 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction ($245.4m), and an alarming -68% the total of 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ($402.1m, the series’ highest-grossing entry). Globally, Last Knight has grossed a decent $517.4m, but it will fall behind the first Transformers ($709.7m) to be the lowest-grossing film in the series.
With regards to profitability, it’s doubtful that The Last Knight will force a write-off for Paramount, even though its production budget comes in at a huge $217 million. The worst-case scenario is that it ekes out a tiny profit in the post-theatrical market. The bigger issue, and one that will be interesting to observe, is the longevity of the Transformers franchise and its place as Paramount’s golden goose.
Paramount itself has struggled with maintaining viable franchises that aren’t Mission: Impossible and Transformers since it lost DreamWorks and Marvel. To keep Transformers churning out money as long as possible, Paramount assembled a “writers room,” akin to television shows, which developed the threads of a cinematic universe. The act of doing so misunderstands the appeal of the Transformers movies – they are loud, boisterous, VFX bonanzas.
People don’t see these movies to witness a thoughtful story, they see them to watch giant robots fight and roam around the Earth. With the past films, it wasn’t a prerequisite to have seen each predecessor to follow the newest entry, and that’s part of what made them a popular time at the cinema – they were accessible. By removing that element, and attempting to create a large-scale, continuous story, “critic-proof” is no longer applicable. With a 15% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5.3/10 score on IMDb, The Last Knight has failed to get audiences on board for “Phase Two,” and has possibly soured the notion of a Transformers cinematic universe. The box office numbers support such.
Paramount has its Bumblebee spin-off, courtesy of Laika veteran Travis Knight, slated for next summer, and there is much pressure for it to perform well in both the critical and financial domains. It must, as Paramount has plans to release a Transformers film each year – a move predicated on desperation to impress stockholders, and that is the factor that could sink the franchise for good.
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