Shia LeBeouf was once one of the biggest movie stars in the world as the lead in the Transformers film franchise, but over the years he's taken a much more negative view on many of his own films. It seems, that while the Transformers movies may have been runaway hits at the box office, Shia LeBeouf was feeling unfulfilled creatively while making them. He doesn't feel the movies will stand the test of time, and as such, thought they were the opposite of the sort of work he should be doing. According to LeBeouf...
My hang-up with those films was that they felt irrelevant. They felt dated as fuck... You come up on these stories about Easy Rider and Raging Bull and De Niro and Scorsese and Hopper, and you find value in what they do. Meanwhile, you're chasing energon crystals. It's very hard to keep doing what you're doing when you feel like it's the antithesis of your purpose on this planet.
If you're comparing the Transformers movies to Raging Bull then, yeah, you're probably going to find yourself coming up short. It seems Shia LeBeouf would much rather be making the sorts of movies that win awards rather than the ones that make massive money at the box office. That's fair. The fact is that rarely does a feature film succeed at both, and while some actors are able to take roles in both sorts of movies, many find themselves a niche in one or the other. Shia LeBeouf was building himself a nice little home in the blockbuster movie scene, between the Transformers franchise and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but he tells Esquire he would have rather been making more serious films.
While movies like Easy Rider and Raging Bull are true classics, and nobody would ever compare Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen to them, it doesn't necessarily mean the latter movies are irrelevant. The fact is the movies made a lot of money because they have a lot of fans, and there's certainly something to be said for that. Whether or not that fan base will persist and people will be watching the Transformers movies 20 years from now is a question we have to wait 20 years to find out. Of course, with the current franchise plan for the brand, they could still be making new Transformers movies in 20 years, which would likely mean new movie fans will be going back to watch them all.
Shia LeBeouf has probably been feeling more fulfilled recently as he has been making much smaller movies that, while they don't win at the box office, have frequently garnered strong critical reviews.
