7 Movie Spinoffs That Were Better Than The Original

The Transformers movie series was in an awful state following the release of 2017's Michael Bay-directed The Last Knight.

Earning the franchise its fifth consecutive Rotten Tomato combined with a huge drop in box-office takings from the previous instalment, it seemed like the best course of action would be to just let the thing die, rather than attempting to salvage what had become a smouldering mess. The series really did need a miracle, which are pretty darn difficult to come by, especially in Hollywood.

But Bumblebee was exactly that. A perfectly-brewed antidote to wash away the taste of the loud and incoherent Bay movies, the '80s-set spinoff actually had likeable characters, a simple yet heartwarming story, and the feeling that it had been crafted with genuine love and care, all things that were absent in the previous films. Oh, and the action scenes were actually comprehensible, rather than being dull grey blocks of pixels mashing into each other over and over.

On top of just being a great movie though, Bumblebee did something that's arguably even more impressive: it made people excited about Transformers again. Just like the characters in the movie, we were all given a sense of hope, the realisation that, hey, you know what, these robot movies - they can be pretty special when they put in the effort.