10 Awful Franchises That Proved Bad Movies Can Still Make Big Money

This entry will focus solely on Michael Bay's contributions to the Transformers franchise, for the sole reason that Travis Knight's Bumblebee was actually good. The 1980s-set spinoff showed what was possible when a movie treated the source material and characters with care and respect, instead of just focusing on orgies of destruction porn that would have made Caligula blush.

Cinema's premiere purveyor of pyrotechnic carnage never seemed like the right fit for the world of the Autobots and Decepticons, and as a result we were given five installments that became increasingly worse, but with almost $4.4bn at the box office you can criticize Bay's methods all you want, but the results definitely can't be argued with.

Loud, dumb, obnoxious, incomprehensibly plotted, very poorly written and loaded with some of the most egregious product placement that's ever been seen, for better or worse each of the first five Transformers movies are very clearly the singular and uncompromised vision of their director.