In 2007, director Michael Bay ignited the chapter of the "Transformers" series of movies with complex and interesting transformation modes, bombarding explosion scenes, and thrilling mecha battles.
By 2019, the total global box office of the 6 "Transformers" movies exceeded $4.8 billion, but the overall reputation of the series of films showed a downward trend, and even "Transformers 5" fell to the bottom, with a Douban score of only 4.9.
After 4 years, "Transformers: The Rise of the Power Warriors" (hereinafter referred to as "Transformers 7") has struck again, seven days after its release, the global box office is less than 200 million US dollars, and the Douban score is the second lowest in the series, barely passing. Even the discussion of "Transformers" on the Internet has long been gone.
In the process of the decline of the "Transformers" IP, what role did the highly anticipated "Transformers 7" play?
The "Transformers" IP has a relatively fixed narrative mode: there is an "alien artifact" on Earth that accidentally fell into the hands of humans. For this reason, it led to a fight between the Autobot team and the Decepticon sect. In the end, evil does not suppress righteousness, the Autobots join forces with humans to defeat the Decepticons, and the world is saved.
The first five movies basically revolve around this mode, occasionally deformed, but replacing some elements, replacing key props or pros and villains to make some additions and deletions.
The title of the 6th "Bumblebee" is not attached to "Transformers", it seems to intend to modify this criticized narrative mode, shaping "Bumblebee" into a warm "cute pet", and the sword going off the edge can also be regarded as saving some word of mouth, but after all, it is not orthodox.
As an IP work that inherits the past and the future, "Transformers 7" has a strong sense of revival in terms of investment cost, production volume and narrative ambition.
The story of this film begins with a key prop, the Super Warp Key, which can open all the doors of time and space. The villain force based on the "natural disaster" wants to snatch the key to summon his master, the Universe Emperor, as can be seen from the name, this is the ultimate villain, who feeds on the planet and needs to use the door of time and space to come to the solar system and devour the earth to quench his hunger and thirst.
In a desperate situation, the Autobot team led by Optimus Prime, the giant team led by Optimus Saint (a mechanical beast that resembles a gorilla), plus two humans, a Latino man Noah, and an African woman Elena, worked together to resist the enemy, and finally killed the invincible "natural disaster" and prevented the arrival of the "Cosmic Emperor".
The storyline of the film is still applying the previous narrative mode: the alien artifact is the key to super warp, the decent force adds a Big Mac to the Autobots, and the villain forces replace the Decepticons with more powerful cosmic emperors and natural disasters. The human team is the first to discover the key, follow decency, go through battles, looming crises, and come together to save the world.
The new director Stephen Kapoor Jr. took the old road created by Michael Bay.
The only visible innovation is probably the introduction of "Super Warriors", that is, the Optimus Saint, Leopard Commander, Rhino Warrior, Flying Arrow Warrior (shaped like a carving) in the film... The combination of such prehistoric behemoths and mechanical life can bring freshness to the audience, but their role in the film is minimal, and the climactic battle passage turns out to be invisible, giving way to established characters such as Optimus Prime and Bumblebee. An elaborate layout ended up being a "bamboo basket for water", which is really regrettable.
As for the human characters in this film, it is also different from the past, the male and female protagonists are not white, which is quite in line with the current popular "political correctness" in Hollywood.
The male protagonist Latino Noah merged with the Autobot "Phantom" in Armageddon and incarnated as the Transformers version of "Iron Man", which is also some kind of innovation, but the Marvel version of "Iron Man" pearl jade is in front, this novelty is not enough.
The image of the heroine African-American Elena, from the previous supermodel beauty to the knowledgeable black man, although it is harmless, but the publicity effect is definitely slightly inferior. The interaction between the male and female protagonists is also limited to comrades-in-arms, and the emotional connection between the two is weak, far less touching than the love of the previous work.
On the left is the heroine of "Transformers 1", and on the right is the heroine of "Transformers 7"
The story falls into the trap, the innovation is insufficient, that's all; The key is the theme idea, which has remained unchanged for 15 years, good and evil are opposites, you die and I live, and there is no additional space for interpretation.
For example, after the natural disaster, after his planet was destroyed by the Universe Emperor, he was willing to become a thug and serve it. He has no human instincts or emotional motives, like a machine that can only carry out commands. Such a villain will only make the battle boring. And the cosmic emperor of this film, his action logic is more simple and rude, just because he is hungry, so he wants to devour the planet.
In contrast, the villain "Thanos" of Marvel movies, he believes that the universe is overpopulated and overwhelmed with resources, and only by cutting the population by half can the entire universe be revitalized. This set of evil and absurd logic, and his emotional bond with his adopted daughter, makes the whole person full of fatalistic tragedy, which directly contributed to the success of "Avengers 3 and 4".
It can be said that "Transformers 7" is a vulgar failure at the level of story, characters and ideas, which not only did not interrupt the decline of the entire IP, but added a fire to its decline.
The creative dilemma of "Transformers 7" has actually been around for a long time. To explore this question, we have to trace the entire history of the evolution of IP.
At a Tokyo toy fair in early 1980, American toy giant Hasbro noticed a series of toys called "Dia Clone". This toy can transform into a dinosaur or a car. Hasbro introduced it and, through improvements, introduced a new toy, the Transformers.
"Transformers" toy, according to Visual China
In order to promote the new toy, Hasbro partnered with Marvel to tailor the relevant story, and the "Transformers G1" cartoon was born. The cartoon, which was originally just an advertisement, became so popular that Hasbro took advantage of the trend and launched 98 episodes in 4 seasons.
In 1987, in order to open up the Chinese market, Hasbro cooperated with Shanghai TV to replace the sales license of the "Transformers" series of toys with animation broadcasting rights. As soon as the animation was broadcast in China, it triggered a boom in the purchase of related toys.
In the late 1990s, Hasbro developed the animated sequel "Power Warriors" and launched new toy products - "Captain Orangutans", "Leopard Warriors", "Tyrannosaurus Rex" and so on. With the industrialization of film and the development of visual effects technology, the conditions are ripe for adapting "Transformers" into live-action films.
In 2007, the first "Transformers" directed by Michael Bay was officially released, and the shocking mecha picture and the enthusiasm of cartoon fans made the film grossing more than $700 million worldwide, and the shopping mall stores selling related toys were also sold out.
Since then, the "Transformers" series of movies has been released almost every two years, benefiting from the vigorous development of the global film market, and the sequel once achieved good box office results.
But by the time "Transformers 5" was released in 2017, the audience had gradually developed aesthetic fatigue with the cookie-cutter mecha battle, and the film not only fell to 4.9 on Douban, but also only $606 million at the global box office, compared to the production cost of $260 million, which is hardly satisfactory. The mainland box office of the sixth "Bumblebee" is even nearly 400 million yuan less than the fifth.
At the beginning of 2022, Hasbro and Paramount were unwilling to give up this potential IP, announcing three new films, "Transformers 7" is only the first work of the plan, and the result is still unsatisfactory after its release in 2023. According to the current domestic and North American box office results and upcoming competitive films such as "The Flash", it can be estimated that the final box office of the film will be in the range of 500 million US dollars. Based on its $200 million production cost, it may be difficult for "Transformers 7" to return to the cost.
In fact, Hasbro and Paramount do not want to solve the dwellings of the previous games in the series, but they are really "congenitally inadequate": the starting point of the entire IP is to sell toys, and toys are an image commodity with no added story value. Unlike Marvel, when it entered the creation of live-action film and television, it itself had rich comic book text support, and there was never a lack of soil for creation.
And director Michael Bay has established a creative style of "emphasizing efficiency, light story, heavy scenes, light characters, heavy business, and light logic" for the "Transformers series" from the first part. Although this point was widely criticized by film critics from the beginning, at that time, this type of mecha blockbuster appeared on the big screen, providing the audience with fresh sensory stimulation, so it was also sought after by fans.
However, with the evolution of the film industry and the emergence of alternative products for toys, the traits that once made "Transformers" movies win have become flooded and mediocre, and it is natural to be abandoned by the audience.
When the crisis appeared, Hasbro and Paramount should have "prescribed the right medicine", but instead of solving the innate "story" problem, their prescription adopted an unrestrained "borrowing" strategy. Just like "Transformers 7", the mechanical monsters in the museum chase and kill humans, very similar to "Jurassic Park"; Enter the Peruvian cave to hunt for treasure, also like "Indiana Jones"; From image to action, Optimus Saint is almost a copy of "King Kong"; The male protagonist Noah is combined with the Autobots, obviously "copying" "Iron Man"; The scene where the door of time and space closes resembles "The Avengers".
The picture is a still from "King Kong", and a still from "Transformers 7" below
This "borrowing" is equivalent to Hasbro and Paramount confessing: they intend to introduce more blockbuster elements to cover up their own creative incompetence. However, the audience's aesthetic threshold has been raised, and in all kinds of alternative visual effects blockbusters, story pleasure has become an important criterion for the audience to choose films. And the immutability of "Transformers 7" is obviously out of place.
"Transformers" has always had the ambition to create a cinematic universe. It can be seen from the ending Easter eggs of "Transformers 7" that the next one should introduce another IP "special forces" under Hasbro.
Autobots, Big Macs, special forces, plus the villain's fear beasts, Decepticons, Cosmic Emperors, etc., clearly want to replicate the success of the "Avengers" and continue to extract the commercial value of IP with a huge movie universe.
But Marvel from 2008's "Iron Man" to 2019's "Avengers 4", using 21 movies as a foreshadowing and creating more than a dozen deeply rooted characters, such as Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, etc., and finally attracted the carnival of fans around the world, realizing the box office myth of $2.798 billion in a single film.
On the other hand, "Transformers" vainly tries to use a fixed narrative mode and a stable set of character images to create their own cinematic universe, which is almost a fantasy.
Perhaps Hasbro and Paramount are also aware of this problem, so they tried in "Transformers 7", they introduced the animated characters of "Super Warriors" and incorporated the Big Mac team into the "Transformers" system; and eager to invite out the ultimate villain Universe Emperor to pave the way for subsequent works; The story scene travels from New York to Peru, wanting to add to the story with the color of exotic culture.
However, these attempts failed: the Big Mac team and the ultimate villain did not establish audience identity, and Peru's existence was only a dispensable backdrop. In the end, the results of the "Transformers" initial construction of the cinematic universe are like a cheap building block building, which is difficult to withstand the test of the market.
What's more, the Marvel movies that "Transformers" followed are now in exhaustion. After "Avengers 4", Marvel was eager to develop the multiverse, introduce new villains and new heroes, and almost blindly win with quantity, so that it fell into a situation where the box office and word of mouth gradually collapsed.
Not only Marvel, but the whole of Hollywood has fallen into fatigue in recent years, and will only develop IP indefinitely. In addition to the "Avengers", the "Fast and Furious" series, the "Mission Impossible" series, the "Star Wars" series, the "Avatar" series... Even the "Indiana Jones" series has been "resurrected", and Harrison Ford, who is in his eighties, is back in battle. After filming the sequel and shooting the prequel, the various "universes" are becoming more and more grand, but they dare not risk trying the original.
Perhaps this is an inevitable choice for the development of commercial films, but this "inevitability" is full of crises and is a big gamble made at the cost of losing the value of IP. Not to mention, classics such as "Schindler's List", "Forrest Gump", "Braveheart", "Titanic" and "Saving Private Ryan" with different themes and styles, but with excellent results in art and business, have almost never been seen again over the years.
"Avengers 4" stills
Back to "Transformers", as an IP that has achieved brilliant results, its determination to create a cinematic universe is understandable, and it also has its own business logic behind it, but if it blindly follows the existing narrative model without forging ahead, stopping at the narrow imagination of the market and ignoring the real demands of the audience, I am afraid that the cinematic universe has not yet been built, and the IP will fall first.
It's time for Hasbro and Paramount, and all of Hollywood, to wake up.
Written by丨Li Ruifeng Editor丨Li Ruifeng