10 Hugely Successful Movies You Didn't Realise LOST Money
6. Transformers: The Last Knight
The Transformers film series, as directed by Michael Bay, have been hugely successful at the box office, even if they have taken a beating critically. Two of the entries grossed over $1 billion worldwide, with Transformers: Age of Extinction being the highest grossing film of 2014.
It then came as a shock when the fifth entry, Transformers: The Last Knight, grossed less than the first film in the franchise.
The Last Knight made over $600 million worldwide, a number that doesn't seem bad at all. However, with a production budget of $217 million, and massive marketing costs, the cracks begin to show.
Because of this big budget and hefty marketing costs, Paramount and the associated studios ended up loosing over $100 million. Part of this loss is also attributable to many other studios, including those that produced the film in China, taking a big cut of the profits.
The failure of The Last Knight forced Paramount to reconsider their whole Transformers cinematic universe idea. Although they pushed forward with Bumblebee, which was already deep in production with The Last Knight released.
This turned out to be a good idea as Bumblebee made a solid profit for Paramount.