More than a billion dollar budget and more than 4.3 billion dollars box office revenue: the “Transformers” series is a blockbuster franchise of superlatives. But the Michael Bay-directed parts 1-5 are only available briefly on Netflix.
Michael Bay has always divided audiences and the trade press as a director, but in no other of his films are genius and madness as close as in the “Transformers” films. In five films, each with a budget of about $200 million behind it, Bay celebrates an unprecedented battle of material full of pyrotechnics, slow-motion action and photo-realistic giant robots that transform into all manner of vehicles and aircraft and battle their way through American cities and streets.
While the action makes the audience’s jaw drop again and again, the content is quite different: Here, the director and his (all male) screenwriters repeatedly reach deep into the drawer of racist, sexist and mostly just completely unfunny humor. Not to mention that, especially in the later films, the plot hardly makes any sense either.
On June 8, 2023, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” the seventh “Transformers” live-action film overall, opens in German theaters and the second not directed by Michael Bay (but by “Creed II” director Steven Caple Jr.).
If you want to watch the Bay pentalogy again before then, you can currently still do so on Netflix – however, “Transformers” (2007), “Transformers 2: Revenge” (2009), “Transformers 3” (2011), “Transformers 4: Era of Doom” (2014) and “Transformers 5: The Last Knight” (2017) are only available on Netflix until May 31, 2023, inclusive.
The reason for this is obvious: The “Transformers” franchise is brought to theaters by Paramount and the Hollywood studio now has its own streaming service: Paramount+. You can already watch “Transformers 1-5” there.
However, the sixth “Transformers” movie “Bumblebee” is not yet available as a subscription from Paramount+; in Germany, it is currently only available from Joyn+ and the Prime Video channels Kabel Eins CLASSICS and Seven Entertainment* (i.e. the rights are held by the ProSiebenSat.1 media group). Sooner or later, however, “Bumblebee” should also end up at Paramount+:
“Bumblebee” is set in the late 1980s, while “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” is set in 1994. This means that both films are set before the first “Transformers” and theoretically form a prequel double. However, in view of numerous contradictions and retcons, one should not place too much value on logical connections and coherence of content.
