Back when we brought you news of the Christian Bale meltdown months ago, I thought it would be the one time we’d ever link to a TMZ story on the site. Although tempted to bring you the Leighton Meester sex tape news that surfaced last week (joking), the folks at Thirty Mile Zone have provided some more information that might be of interest to film fans.
TMZ got a hold of two e-mails sent from Michael Bay, director of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, to head honchos at Paramount studios. The first, dated May 4, has Bay blasting the company for their marketing efforts and failure to register Transformers as an event film in the pop culture ether. He even goes on to say the President of the company went on Wall Street and name-dropped Star Trek and G.I. Joe as the two blockbusters the studio had in the pipeline this summer.
The second e-mail, dated June 6, must have been a direct result of sending out the initial e-mail as Bay relents and thanks Paramount for “busting (their) butts” to finally get the film out there.
I think both e-mails are interesting reads, just from the perspective of seeing the filmmaking process up close. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Although I may not like all the movies the guy directs, I do respect Bay.
Ahhh, TMZ, the bane of my existence.
But I would have to agree with Bays’ anger in theory on Paramount not dropping Transformers, because this will be the biggest film of the summer.
But then again, it was going to be anyway so I can see the pres of Paramount trying to promote the films that may not be one that everyone was going to see, like ST and GIJoe. But really, is dropping movie names in Wall Street, was it in the Journal?, really going to make or break T2? Doubtful. And he talks about Spiderman 2 being everywhere. My theory on films of this nature, of this status, is that people are going to see them no matter what and spending countless millions on excessive advertising is a waste of money. Would you stop buying Coke, Honda,or Big Macs if these companies werent advertising them as much? Probably not. Im sure everyone and there grandmothers know that T2 is coming out so spending an extra 20 or 30 million in advertising dollars is 20 or 30 million wasted.
I don’t know for sure, but I assumed the “Wall Street” Bay was referring to was investors in Paramount stock. You would imagine you’d like to hype of ‘Transformers’ for them.
It’s weird, I honestly don’t believe as much has been made about ‘Revenge of the Fallen’ as had the original ‘Transformers.’ Maybe because the first footage was released at the Super Bowl this time, whereas the first teaser trailer for ‘Transformers’ was at least a year ahead of time.
I would also agree that the film would be huge no matter what and you wouldn’t necessarily need Taco Bell tie-ins and stuff, but we still loved those damn ‘Batman & Robin’ pogs. “Alfred!”
Also somewhat amusing is Bay’s director’s fee is directly correlated to the profit the movie makes. He opted for a percentage, so the bigger the profit, the bigger the payday for Bay.
I recently read that Bay made a cool $75 million from the first Transformers, and he will probably make even more from the second.