Longtime blockbuster filmmaker Michael Bay is opening up about the current state of Hollywood filmmaking while promoting We Are Storrer during SXSW.

Bay’s comments about the state of filmmaking came during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Michael Bay was asked about his previous hit films and how so many of them were originals rather than drawing on previously existing IP and if those films could be made today:

I just had a conference call with Jim Cameron and we were both commiserating about Hollywood. No one can greenlight anything anymore. It’s just so slow. It’s a very different business. During Armageddon, those were the days. We had Jonathan Hensleigh, the writer. We sat down for two or three weeks. We had the NASA guy come into my office. We worked out this 20-minute pitch. We go into [former Walt Disney Chairman] Joe Roth’s office. This would be my third movie. And Joe, he’s like a real old time, cool studio executive. He goes, “That’s going to be my July 4th movie. I want to name it Armageddon.” We walk out and we’re looking at each other. “Did he just greenlight that movie?” That doesn’t happen now. But that’s how it used to happen.

As one can see from his answer, Michael Bay is not the only filmmaker having these thoughts. One doesn’t need to look far to see the current state of things. Ben Affleck himself has mentioned how Argo would be a limited series rather than theatrical release if it were made in the post-pandemic years. That’s how much things have changed since the Covid-19 pandemic started in 2020. Covid slowed things down and almost as soon as Hollywood began to recover, the double strikes happened. As if that’s not enough, Los Angeles now has to rebound from the recent wildfires.

The bigger IPs–like a Michael Bay Transformers movie–will continue to get butts in seats but original ideas will still have an uphill climb. Even with the right pedigree, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be a hit. Look at Ticket to Paradise in 2022. A film with George Clooney and Julia Roberts should be a no-brainer $100 million domestic blockbuster, nu? It couldn’t even reach $70 million at the domestic box office. The film did way better overseas! More recently, The Fall Guy had everything come together in the right way–David Leitch directing Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt–and it still lost $50-60 million. Produced on a $125-150 million budget, the film couldn’t even earn $100 million at the domestic office.

While We Are Storrer looks to be a very different Michael Bay movie–it’s a documentary–it’s getting tougher and tougher to greenlight original films these days. At least, the type of films that Hollywood studios were releasing in the 1990s, let alone the early 2000s. As we’ve seen, even with the right pedigree, there is no guarantee that it’ll bring in the type of audience that a studio would prefer. A good bit of this has to do with changing viewer habits. Why spend so much money at the theater when you could wait for a film to be available at an affordable price on a streaming platform.

Come to think of it, I don’t even think if Michael Bay could get 6 Underground greenlit today, even with Ryan Reynolds starring. It’s such an expensive film with a $150 million budget. Netflix didn’t release the box office numbers of the very limited theatrical release. However, the film had 83 million viewers during its first month of release. We don’t know how many viewers watched the entire film. A few years later, Universal Pictures released Ambulance in 2022. Produced on a $40 million budget, the film earned $22.8 million domestically.

Michael Bay’s We Are Storrer holds its world premiere during the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival.

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