Michael Bay Will Have No Part in ‘Transformers 2′

Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on August 21, 2007

The battle over Blu-Ray and HD-DVD has allegedly reached its turning point. Yesterday Coming Soon reported that Paramount and Dreamworks would be officially taking sides in the great HD medium battle, committing to HD-DVD as the exclusive format for all releases under the Paramount Pictures, Dreamworks Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Nickelodeon Movies, MTV Films and Dreamworks Animation titles. Today, Transformers director Michael Bay fired back, saying he doesn’t agree. And it gets worse…

“I want people to see my movies in the best formats possible. For them to deny people who have Blu-ray sucks! They were progressive by having two formats. No Transformers 2 for me!” Bay said on the forum of his official site, Shoot for the Edit.

The question is whether or not the studio will even give a flying shit about Bay’s opinion. They did roll over for Stephen Spielberg’s films, saying in their press release that the announcement “does not include films directed by Steven Spielberg as his films are not exclusive to either format.” Will they do the same for Bay? No one can be certain at this point. But it does raise a concern around a Transformers sequel. To my knowledge, Bay was locked in for 3 flicks if the studio should choose to make them. Who knows. My personal feeling is that they should release films on both formats for now, allowing consumers to decide. So many manufacturers have already begun work on dual-format players, leading this reporter to believe that this “Format War” is going to go on for a long time. I can’t understand why they’d want to fight it.

Oh yeah. It’s the money. How foolish of me to forget?

What do you think about this whole mess?

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