If you’ve ever seen the Transformers movies, you might think that you have a pretty good handle on why Michael Bay has yet to direct a Marvel or DC film. But you’d be wrong. The thing is, Michael Bay could totally direct one of those movies if he wanted to. He just doesn’t want to.
“I wouldn’t want to, it’s not my thing, it’s just not my gig,” Bay revealed to members of the press while filming Transformers: The Last Knight this past summer, Collider reports. “I don’t ever wanna take someone like a third of something or second of something. I gotta do my own thing, ’cause the most fun is when a real director creates the world. You know, you talk to Ridley Scott, one of our favorite things to do is to create the world. Steven Spielberg, create the world. That is what it’s about.”
And then, after that brief exercise in name-dropping, he added the operative clause: “If I were to do something, I would have to redo it my way.”
Say no more. We totally get it. Bay has a very, let’s say, particular style of filmmaking, and it probably wouldn’t resonate very well with either the universe of The Avengers or of Batman V Superman. Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige keeps a notoriously tight lid of the aesthetic of his babies, and DC’s filmmakers have so far (for good or ill) stayed pretty close to the washed-out, bleak ambience established by Zack Snyder in Man Of Steel. It seems unlikely that Bay would be willing to set aside his explosion-and-frenetic editing-heavy philosophy to play in somebody else’s sandbox. And it seems equally unlikely that either superhero franchise would be interested in accommodating his “Bayhem” method of expressing himself onscreen.
For what it’s worth, Bay doesn’t dislike the Marvel or DC movies. “I really liked [Captain America:] Civil War. I like a lot of the Marvel movies,” he told the press during that same on-set visit. “When I saw Iron Man, it broke a lot of new ground for me, and it was a great character. Funny, witty, I liked that about it.” All that, despite the fact that in those films you could generally tell where characters existed in space and what was happening from moment to moment. Michael Bay contains multitudes.