10 Terrible Films That Somehow Made A Killing At The Box Office
3. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - $836,303,693 & 2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon - $1,123,746,996
As with Twilight there seems little point writing separate entries for Michael Bay's two unpleasant Transformers sequels. True, the first one was no masterpiece but a lot of fun all the same. The high-school humour was cheesy but not yet so ludicrous, and after a clever marketing campaign in which the live-action Transformers themselves were barely seen, it was great to see them gradually revealed more and more as the film progressed, for both fans and newbies alike. Bay would then hit us with the kitchen sink for his sequels, but learned the hard way that sometimes less is more, and that ideas that may seem amusing on paper don't always translate well into the finished product. Between them ROTF and DOTM amassed 15 Razzie award nominations, with the first sequel still holding the honour of being the highest-grossing Worst Picture winner. In case you'd forgotten, here's a recap of some of its worst sins: John Turturro's jockstrap, Devastator's wrecking balls, Shia LaBeouf in robot Heaven, the racist Mudflap and Skids characters period. Despite the grave predicament we're supposed to believe the heroes are in, the Decepticons are never seen to constitute much of a genuine threat, with the final confrontation lasting all of ten seconds. Critically DOTM was slightly better received than its predecessor, but that was hardly saying much. Plenty of films rewrite history, but to brush over the Chernobyl disaster as a Transformer-related incident seemed particularly callous. The film gives us a final battle that goes on for sixty minutes, kills off Megatron in ignominious fashion, a final middle-finger to fans, and then abruptly stops. Interestingly, despite it being a very American film (location, cast, history, military, propaganda), American audiences cottoned on to how bad the series had become much faster than the rest of the world (or perhaps were too enraged at the rewriting of the Moon Landing), with revenues for the third film being $50 million down on ROTF, in spite of the higher 3D ticket prices. Foreign audiences by contrast saw fit to spend over $300 million more in wasting three hours of their lives, thus incredibly making DOTM the fifth highest-grossing film of all time. Here's hoping that a fourth film starring Mark Wahlberg instead of Shia might go some way towards salvaging the series...