As if last year wasn't bad enough. Can't believe that the only successful blockbuster movies this summer are Wonder Woman, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming, which are mostly superhero flicks at the start of each summer month! The most successful animated title is, you guessed it, Despicable Me 3 which I didn't feel hyped to see even after #2 following my first though underwhelming viewing of Minions. The losers? Among them are mostly franchise fatiguers, which includes Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Pixar's Cars 3 (despite being much better than the inferior and Pixar's first "lemon" Cars 2), Alien: Covenant (the needless prequel to the original Alien films and follow-up to the confusing Prometheus, which I'm glad I did not plan to see), and worst of all... Transformers: The Last Knight! There's even some laughable box office bombs, which is exactly as I predicted, like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Then there's The Emoji Movie, which breaks the all-time record for being one of the worst-reviewed animated films of all time. Except that it still made decent money despite almost having a 0% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Thankfully, I skipped seeing that like I have with Tom Cruise's The Mummy. Speaking of which, The Mummy is the one that had trouble deciding what it wants to be, whether as a typical by-the-numbers action film or as a "horror" movie part of some cinematic universe that Universal thinks is a good idea to have classic horror monster icons appear in the modern day world and be played by aged-out motion picture stars like Dwayne Johnson, Johnny Depp, and Channing Tatum when they were a lot scarier in the oldies. That's the problem I now have with setting up cinematic universes!
I mean come on, what in the world has this come down to? Besides Spider-Man: Homecoming, Transformers: The Last Knight was like my highly-anticipated summer 2017 movie. But based on the box office figures and the critical word-of-mouth, I knew that I couldn't rely on some brilliant Writers' Room that acts as though things are going to change for the better for this already critically blasted action-packed yet tiresome movie franchise that is bringing in nearly $4 billion. To think that by not bringing in some of the most hated elements (Tessa, Shane, "Transformium", etc.) from the 2014 predecessor Age of Extinction except bringing back Lennox, Simmons, police car Decepticon Barricade and making Megatron back to his traditional and more powerful self, The Last Knight was going to bring back what we missed so much from 1-3. But to no avail, like Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Batman v Superman, it absolutely failed on so many levels by being too easily attached to the usual stuff that we now know have officially gone too far! In what should have been a franchise game-changer like Fast Five, TF5 instead relies on cutting back to very unlikeable humans like the Tony Hale Physics Engineer, not being very consistent with the even messier timeline full of previously established events from the first four films that clearly doesn't know where the whole "secret history of Transformers" events explained by Anthony Hopkins will fit in, not using the Autobot and Decepticon characters in an effective manner other than for cheap fan service (namely Dinobots that have an even worse amount of screentime than Jared Leto's Joker), as well as not being clear on what the main focus was when you have TRF hunting down both Autobot and Decepticon alike, Knights protecting the Staff of Merlin from Quintessa, some secret society covering up the hidden presence of Transformers, Optimus Prime became corrupted and almost killed Bumblebee which is all that "Nemesis Prime" does after encountering Quintessa on Cybertron, and the coming of the chaos bringer Unicron who is clearly Earth itself! As I look at the box office performance of this fifth installment, I wasn't so sure if The Last Knight deserves to be seen as canon with the first three films along with what I thought for sure was the weakest Transformers film of all time (the one with the final act set in Hong Kong) despite being mostly intrigued by the more interesting robots like Hot Rod and Cogman. It's like maybe Paramount should never have thought about making more films to expand the storyline left by Dark of the Moon, which I now believe is where the story should have ended so that we don't have to go through with all the confusing Transformer-affected history stuff and the humans (minus caring ones like Mark Wahlberg) hating the Autobots that is just becoming ridiculous! A shame that the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film made MORE MONEY (luckily with more than $790 million worldwide including $172 million stateside) than the official "franchise-killer" of the Transformers movies. At least that one was more fun and not very confusing for me. And even though there's a Bumblebee spin-off movie already on the way ('til next December to be exact), I'm not so sure how such an unfortunate box office outcome from TF5 is going to affect the future of the entire Transformers franchise, and whether or not the studio is still keen on making a direct continuation to TLK already set for release in June 28th 2019?
I was kind of hoping that aside from arriving on the first opening day of Pandora: The World of Avatar in Disney's Animal Kingdom and going a cruise trip with my family throughout the European countries like St. Petersburg and Finland, this summer would have been completely free of wasteful financially failed sequels like Independence Day: Resurgence and Alice Through the Looking Glass, since I got to see what could have been a welcome return to the once-proud blockbuster franchises (Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney/Pixar's Cars). Especially if one of them was the most despised blockbuster franchise (Transformers). Unfortunately, only the superhero ones (both Marvel and DC) made it out unscathed by what is now going to be known as the "franchise fatigue curse." Wonder Woman and Guardians of the Galaxy 2 are both tied as my favorite summer flicks of this year.
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| Apes together strong! |
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| It's Morphin' Time! |
