Michael Bay spent a full decade deep in the world of the Transformers. He made five films in those 10 years, but the action-focused director has finally begun branching out. He has a new film Six Underground on the way, and he's about to go to work on yet another movie, called Black 5. Although, this new project happens to reunite him with Ehren Kruger who penned three of those five Transformers movies.
Variety has no details on what Black 5 is about, but in standard Michael Bay operating procedure, it's confirmed to be heavy on the action. While Ehren Kruger wrote the script, the project is apparently based on an original idea from Michael Bay himself. Sony is reportedly on board to produce and distribute.
The three Transformers movies written by Ehren Kruger are the three most successful films in the franchise as far as global box office are concerned, so he and Michael Bay do seem to work well together. Of course, Black 5 doesn't sound like the title of a giant robot movie, but I suppose we don't really know.
Black 5 is apparently also being developed as a video game. It seems that these are concurrent ideas, rather than simply having plans to base a video game on the movie idea. Perhaps the two concepts will tell separate stories within the same world. Video games have much longer development times than games. If the idea is to release the two products together it could mean that Black 5 the movie won't actually hit screens for a few years.
Alternatively, if the game is set to come out after the movie, than the idea certainly makes an expectation that the movie will be successful enough that people will be interested in playing the game sometime later.
Michael Bay's next film, Six Underground co-stars Ryan Reynolds and will be the director's first project for Netflix. It will be interesting to see how Bay's visual style translates to a movie that's designed to be seen on a smaller screen. Even when Bay isn't making giant robot movies his film are full of serious action that usually involve massive explosions and buildings collapsing.
Michael Bay's last theatrical released non-Transformers movie was 13:Hours: The Secret Solders of Benghazi, the film about the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya. With Six Underground and now Black 5 it seems that Michael Bay has truly left the Transformers behind him.
Of course, that franchise will likely continue. Bumblebee was a critical success, though it didn't bring in the box office of the other entries, at least not domestically. At some point we can be sure we'll be getting more Transformers films, if they can find somebody else who can bring Michael Bay style action back to the brand.
