Stephen King Walked Out of Only One Movie; It Made $700 Million At the Box Office
All celebrities have their likes and dislikes regarding cinema. Stephen King is no exception. But there is only one film which made him walk out of the theatre as an adult.
As King himself said in a Twitter thread, that film was Michael Bay's Transformers ( 2007). And this sentiment is not exactly uncommon.
Bay's Transformers series was and is a major commercial success, with the original movie earning over $700 million in the box office, and the series as a whole reaching over $4.5 billion, but hardly anyone praises it for anything but special effects and bombastic spectacle.
In some way, this film series earning as much as it does is somewhat of an enigma, given how critical almost everyone is about its almost every aspect. Human characters and storyline remain underdeveloped and their existence almost pointless, despite occupying two thirds or more of every movie.
Transformer characters get too little screentime, and only a handful of them are remotely distinguishable. Robot fights… well, even if you're a person who's in the theatre just to watch robots beating up each other, actual fights are few and often poorly choreographed, to the point it is difficult to figure out what's going on.
Nearly everything about the world is inconsistent. There is no respect for previous iterations of the franchise.
In short, it is very difficult to imagine a story following the exact same plot as "Bayformers" to be successful or notable for anything else other than its badness in any other medium. But in live action it somehow managed to become a major success. Despite even its fans agreeing that most of the sequels, at the very least, were various degrees of bad.
Even Michael Bay himself believes he went too far.
"I made too many of them. Steven Spielberg said, 'Just stop at three'. And I said I'd stop. The studio begged me to do a fourth, and then that made a billion too. And then I said I'm gonna stop here. And they begged me again. I should have stopped. They were fun to do."
But despite all of this, the box office still clearly says that Stephen King 's reaction to these movies was uncommon.