5. Michael Bay
Known For: Directing a number of adrenaline-infused, high-budget, effects-driven action flicks such as Bad Boys I and II, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbour, The Island and the Transformers franchise.
The Last 10 Years: The last decade has seen Michael Bay take his rather homogeneous brand of Hollywood blockbuster and turn it up to 11, by way of The Island and, more crucially, four Transformer movies that have grossed over $3.5 billion in total. By this point in his career, Bay is just coasting on the fact that he knows hordes of people like his style, no matter how tired more knowing audiences might be of it.
The Exception: Pain and Gain, though still packed with plenty of the childish humour and casual sexism that defines the director's bigger-budgeted, PG-13 movies, was at least a little different. It cost "only" $26 million, and with its R-rating, didn't need to pander to the teenage boy demographic that his Transformers movies unashamedly do.
What We'd Love To See: Bay is clearly a superb stylist even when he's running on auto-pilot, so to see him working from a script that was more intelligent would certainly be of interest. Bay isn't the world's worst director like a lot of people like to say: he's just lazy and comfortable with the enormous repeat returns that sticking to formula allows. If he ever feels like he has enough money, perhaps we might see something more along the lines of Pain and Gain, but with a smarter script.