Jesus Christ. If anything, I gave Bay too much credit. I said they made 10 billion when they actually only made a bit over 5.
View attachment 522659
But regardless, you have to be completely smooth-brained to imagine something making a lot of money automatically means it maxed out its potential.
There were essentially 3 gigantic properties in the 80's: He-Man, G.I. Joe, and Transformers. An entire generation of boys grew up with at least one of those as a major part of their childhood and most with all three. When the 2000's rolled around they had already done He-Man very poorly in the 90's so Transformers and G.I. Joe were up. All they had to do was lean as heavily into the nostalgia as possible and make the movies as direct a copy of the old TV shows as possible. The G.I. Joe movies completely fucked it up, but Transformers had a unique opportunity given the advances in CGI and managed to make a very solid first movie. The problems with that first movie, namely far too much time with the humans; focusing on Bumblebee for God knows what reason; and fucking with the established lore and characters, proved too much to overcome as the subsequent movies amplified those fuck-ups resulting in a series that SHOULD have made more than twice as much being completely ran into the ground so much that nobody gives a shit about the property again. For fuck's sake, the Fast & Furious movies gross more per movie. So did Twilight and the goddamn Hunger Games, all properties that didn't have the type of massive, built-in audience in their prime earning years. A proper Transformers movie series would have been crazy popular from beginning to end, not one good one with a few watchable and the rest massive pieces of trash coasting on the name and reputation of a dead series.