Robbins wanted greater than Bay. He additionally needed to get Hasbro and “Transformers” govt producer Steven Spielberg to log off.
In 2007, everybody with a monetary stake in these properties would’ve instructed Robbins to go to hell. Spielberg and Bay have been launching a billion-dollar franchise; they did not need to dilute a positive factor. Hasbro, in the meantime, needed two separate Hollywood income streams.
16 years after Bay’s first “Transformers” film, it is a decidedly completely different ballgame. The robots-in-disguise sequence has gone from raking in $1 billion per movie to, with this 12 months’s “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” a relatively paltry $428 million. As for the erstwhile “Actual American Hero” motion figures, Stephen Sommers’ “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and John M. Chu’s “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” topped out globally with, respectively, grosses of $303 million and $376 million. Solely the latter (barely) doubled its manufacturing price range.
Nonetheless, in keeping with Robbins, Bay was initially unwilling to let the Joe crew enter his much more worthwhile universe.