Today Hollywood is all about the franchise. Every studio is looking for one, or more, big movie ideas that they can use to churn out one film after another. Could audiences get tired of it? One producer doesn't think so. Lorenzo di Bonaventura is one of the men behind the Transformers franchise and he doesn't seem too worried about the potential for sequels to fall out of favor, because it's happened before, and yet, here we are.
Transformers 19 --- we'll be talking about that 10 years from now. (Laughs.) But I'm glad they believe in the franchise. I don't want to pick on any movie [this summer], so I would say this: The quality of the sequel is very important, and if you fail at the quality, you're going to fail. It's funny, though, because when I first got in the business 25 years ago, there was a summer where all the sequels didn't do well. And everybody said, "No more sequels." And here we are 25 years later with a hell of a lot of sequels.
Transformers: The Last Knight is currently filming. After that, two additional films will be made in the series, along with a spinoff film starring Bumblebee. That's a lot of eggs to put in one basket, especially considering that the Transformers movies are some of the most expensive to make in modern Hollywood. If moviegoers ever truly do give up on sequels, it will likely leave the Transformers producers holding the bag, and out quite a bit of money.
In the end, though, Lorenzo di Bonaventura's comments to The Hollywood Reporter are absolutely right. Hollywood is always looking for patterns and equations in order to predict what movies people will go see. Sometimes this means Hollywood decides that they can't make sequels ever again, and then, a few years later, they decide that they must make ALL THE SEQUELS. The fact that the second decision means they have to explain in the first one never seems to cross anybody's mind.
There's no such thing as "sequel fatigue." There is, however, "terrible movie fatigue." People aren't going to go see, or make a point to avoid, Transformers: The Last Knight simply because it's the fifth entry in the franchise. If they liked the previous ones, they'll go, and if they didn't, they won't. That's about all that really matters. If Transformers 5 bombs it will be because people have decided that the franchise isn't good, not because sequels are bad.
Based on your current feeling on the franchise, will you go see Transformers 19 if the series ever gets there? Is there really a reason to ever stop making the movies if they continue to make billions of dollars? Let us know what you think in the comments.
