WARNING: SPOILERS for Transformers: The Last Knight Below!

All isn't well in Transformers world. Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth outing in the decade-long franchise of "Robots in Disguise" opened to a franchise-low 5-day weekend total of about $64-million at the North American box office- a far cry from the $100-million opening of its immediate predecessor, Age of Extinction. In its first week, The Last Knight has raked in about $73-million, only slightly more than the inaugural Transformers film made in its 2007 opening weekend. However, The Last Knight, following the trend of The Mummy earlier in June, is doing bigger business overseas. It opened big in China (the film was financed by Chinese corporations) and has made over $200-million in foreign markets, but in just 7 days of release, The Last Knight dropped a staggering 82% at the Chinese box office. It's hard to argue much of the spark has dissipated from the Transformers AllSpark.

The blame falls at the feet of director Michael Bay, just as when Transformers ruled the world, the credit belonged to him as well. As the auteur of every entry in the franchise, Michael Bay is synonymous with Transformers. In terms of other blockbuster movie series, Bay has few equals among his peers - only Peter Jackson eclipses him as the sole helmer of the six Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit films. Bryan Singer, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas all follow Bay by directing four X-Men, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars films, respectively. For better or worse, we've never known a live action Transformers movie that isn't a frenzied, hyper-adrenalized, explosive cacophony only Michael Bay can deliver. While he certainly has his detractors, as a director of action movies, Michael Bay is in a class by himself.

Bay has announced that The Last Knight is his last Transformers movie, though he's said that before. Age of Extinction was supposed to be his swansong, but he quickly reversed course and signed on to helm The Last Knight. Mark Wahlberg, who starred in the two most recent Transformers and himself claims he's done with the franchise, has his doubts that Bay has rolled out with the Autobots for the final time:

"Right now he says he doesn’t want to do another film and he says that after every film because they are so difficult to make and he pretty much has to do it single-handedly, even with all the help that he has because all of the movie is in his mind... I would be hard pressed to see him walk away and put it in somebody else’s control and care. I mean, that’s just the Michael that I know, but you never know, sometimes people decide to move on, so we’ll see what happens.”

It's admirable that Michael Bay cares so much about Transformers. To be sure, he must care deeply and genuinely; filmmaking is an all-consuming process and studio tentpole franchises like Transformers, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, require years of focused commitment from a director. The Last Knight, the biggest film of the franchise thus far in terms of scope, struggling where its predecessors soared must be a stinging blow to a guy accustomed to success like Michael Bay. One of the main reasons fans are hoping Daniel Craig returns for a fifth James Bond movie is the relatively poor reception Spectre received compared to the superior Skyfall. No one wants to leave a blockbuster franchise on a dud; everyone wants to redemption. It's hard to fathom Michael Bay is pleased to exit Transformers on a low note. While there are Transformers fans who have longed for the day Bay finally abandons the franchise so other directors can put their own stamp on the robots from Cybertron, Transformers is Michael Bay's franchise unless he truly is serious that he's finished with it.

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Meanwhile, the Transformers franchise needs an overhaul. Just as every other Hollywood studio is following Marvel Studios' lead and is cultivating a shared universe of movie properties, Paramount has assembled a writer's room of nearly a dozen screenwriters including Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), Zak Penn (X-Men: The Last Stand), and Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) to hatch a grand mythology for the future of the franchise. The first results of this brain trust can be witnessed in The Last Knight: a sprawling re-working of nearly all of human history where the Transformers are revealed to actually have been visiting Earth since the time of King Arthur (who was real - why not?) and have been harboring a secret about the very nature of our planet: that Earth itself is a Transformer planet called Unicron and is the arch enemy of the Transformers' home world of Cybertron. Where this leaves the fate of humanity in the wake of learning the very ground beneath our feet harbors a giant Transformer is a question future Transformers movies will no doubt bombastically address, whether or not Bay will be in the director's chair.

As the Transformers mythology expands beyond logical comprehension, something vital has been lost in the process: genuine human connection to the events surrounding the eternal war between Autobots and Decepticons. The 2007 film was a relatively simpler tale and it contained a basic and powerful theme that resonated with audiences: wish fulfillment. After spending years trying to figure out how to make a Transformers movie and what it would be about, producer Steven Spielberg cracked the code by ingeniously suggesting the core idea of the first film: a boy and his car.

In short, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) was a teenager who wanted the two things any teenage boy wants - to date the hottest girl in school, Mikaela Barnes (Megan Fox), and to own a car that would impress her. The used car his father bought him turned out to be Bumblebee, an Autobot who quickly transformed himself into a sleek Chevy Camaro. Sam got Mikaela to spend time with him, and soon, Bumblebee introduces them to the other Autobots, including their leader Optimus Prime. The next thing they know, Sam and Mikaela are thrust into the intergalactic war between the Autobots and Decepticons. They fight alongside the Autobots and save the world. What more could a boy want? (Besides to save the world two more times, which Sam did, the third time with a different hot girlfriend played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.)

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"Hidden history" was always a key component of Transformers. The first film revealed Megatron had been frozen in ice for nearly a century and the Hoover Dam was secretly built as a prison for him. By the second film, the revelations of the secret Transformers history on Earth began to overtake the franchise. Sam and his human friends were mainly pulled along for each frenetic ride as the movies made more and more absurd reveals about what the Transformers were doing on Earth: the pyramids in Egypt housed a secret Transformers weapon; the moon landing was really to investigate a crashed Transformers ship, and that the robots were seeding organic metal called "Transformium" on Earth for thousands of years to eventually turn technology on the planet into more Transformers. The Last Knight pushes the secret history concept all the way.

However, there's no joy left in the idea of being friends and allies with the heroic Autobots; the cool factor of your car being able to transform into an alien robot has long since been lost amidst the constant global destruction the Transformers reap. By the time six robot horns horrifically emerge from Earth signifying Unicron while Cybertron bears down on our planet signaling imminent doom, one has to wonder why any human being would ever want to live in a world with the Transformers? The future of the Transformers franchise The Last Knight teased only continues this apocalyptic agenda.

Paramount not only intends to spin off Bumblebee into a prequel set in the 1980s, but also has an eye of expanding their shared universe by merging it with other Hasbro properties like G.I. Joe and M.A.S.K. That's all well and good, if audiences are game for it (outside of Marvel, DC and the King Kong and Godzilla MonsterVerse, audiences seem to be pushing back against more shared universes). However, the multi-billion-dollar main Transformers franchise is the one Paramount needs to be most concerned with now, especially as it's starting to show signs that it's not capable of making a billion dollars per film anymore. This wheels are coming off the bigger-is-better strategy they are pushing.

Are audiences getting tired of Transformers? Possibly, but more to the point, what they're getting most tired of is endless overblown spectacle, sophomoric attempts at humor, and a lack of characters (human and robot) they can invest in and care for. For five films now, Transformers has been rampant with thinly-sketched human characters and legions of unsightly robots devoid of personality beyond uttering basic 'heroic' or 'villainous' platitudes or exhibiting outright racist and stereotypical tropes. While this has been the case since the first Transformers, there were at least some finer qualities in that film to latch onto. It was relatively grounded in a way the four sequels are not.

Michael Bay, if he chooses to return to helm Transformers 6, can save the franchise he built by returning it to its roots and once more finding the seed of humanity within the spectacle of Transformers. This doesn't necessarily mean bringing back Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox. Sure, audiences would be interested in seeing them return for the sake of nostalgia but that's a band aid for a gaping wound bleeding Energon fuel. What audiences really want is to care about what they're watching again, in a similar way to how young Sam wanting a girlfriend and a car was inherently relatable, and thus more interesting than Evil Optimus Prime going on a rampage or gaping at apocalyptic Transformer planets.

Maybe saving Transformers is best left to a different filmmaker and Michael Bay really will ride an Autobot into the sunset. But no one else has any track record directing live action Transformers, and Bay is the franchise's primary architect who has led the property to billions in grosses. If Bay does decide to come back for one more, hopefully it's not to break the world but to save it by finding a way to recapture the inherent magic of Transformers: making it about the humanity of both the people and of the robots. Overbearing spectacle has had its day; it's time to prove once again that there's more to Transformers than meets the eye.

NEXT: TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT REVIEW