By the time Michael Bay made 2011’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” the director had become intimately familiar with the mechanics of making the gargantuan film series.

It might have taken convincing from executive producer Steven Spielberg, but Bay made the franchise synonymous with his brand of blockbuster. The first two films in the series were massive productions that achieved massive success, at least commercially, and the third one would be even bigger.

Throughout the making of the series, production difficulties were surmounted by Bay in his typically forward-looking, pragmatic manner. According to Super Hero Hype, he had kept the budget down on the 2007 original film by striking an exclusive deal with General Motors for the cars. Shortly after, the 2007-08 Writers Strike had frozen development on the sequel “Revenge of the Fallen,” which led to Bay locking the writers in a hotel room to finish the script the minute the strike ended.

But the biggest difficulty the series had faced yet came after the release of “Revenge,” when Bay and the filmmakers would scrap female lead Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox). Fox had been essential to the movies, which used her as the wish-fulfillment love interest for their prospective teen boy audience. While capitalizing on her appearance, the movies gave the star little to do besides look good and serve as a magnet for legions of online haters.

Nobody could agree on why exactly Fox and Bay parted ways on “Dark of the Moon.” But given the fairly large supporting cast that stayed constant through the series, her abrupt departure was notable. It was also disruptive for the sequel, meaning the filmmakers had to navigate it quickly.

Dream casting

While the first three Michael Bay “Transformers” movies deal with the adventures of Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) a young man who comes of age in the midst of an alien war taking place on Earth, his supporting cast was essential to the movies’ success. It wasn’t just about the still-stunning special effects or over-the-top explosions. The fact that there was an expansive group of people who had their own relationships with the Autobots and Decepticons gave the movies a realistic sensibility that kept the blockbuster spectacle a little bit grounded.

Sam having a girlfriend like Mikaela helped too. Casting a woman who would go on to be called the “world’s sexiest woman” by British men’s magazine FHM (per BBC) was a major coup for the series. While Sam was a dork who screamed and struggled, Mikaela was cool and confident, and somehow she liked him. For the movie’s intended teen boy audience, it was obvious why.

Michael Bay had only asked Megan Fox two questions before hiring her for the role, making sure she was ready to do a lot of physical work and also have her body on full display. Seeing both the original and 2009’s “Revenge of the Fallen,” it’s clear that both were the case — she ran around as much as Shia LaBeouf and bared her midriff a lot more. The shots of her working on cars are like Bay making pin-ups in motion, just as maximalist as the carnage.

While Bay might have cast Fox in a star-making role, and both she and the series benefited in some ways from the association, the two did not have an especially positive relationship.

Greener pastures

With the 2009 film “Jennifer’s Body,” Megan Fox was given the chance to be in a movie that offered her a bit of artistic leeway. Per The Numbers, that movie had a budget of $16 million, just a little over 1/10 of the budget of the first “Transformers” film. The smaller canvas let Fox play an actual character, a horror movie villain, something that could truly reveal her talent as she tapped into her dark side.

“Jennifer’s Body” wasn’t immediately recognized as the cult hit viewers love today. Fox, having broken free of the Mikaela Banes characterization, was still criticized and objectified by the misogynistic online media apparatus. It was as if “Revenge of the Fallen,” one of the biggest hits of the summer of 2009, had suffocated her career for the time being, limiting her to being Michael Bay’s pin-up muse.

Bay might have had a reputation for being a taskmaster when it comes to running sets, demanding the best of his cast and crew while working extremely fast. Still, the “Transformers” productions saw him giving a lot of love to the expansive supporting cast. As he told Super Hero Hype while promoting the first movie, “I love working with actors, I love giving actors freedom, I love improv-ing with actors.” That might have been the case for everybody except Megan Fox, who didn’t mince words when talking about his dictatorial tendencies.

“He wants to be like Hitler on his sets,” she had told Wonderland magazine. “A nightmare to work for. […] He’s all hot air.”

Spin war

The reaction to the Megan Fox interview was swift. According to Deadline, Michael Bay’s website carried a vicious open letter from three unnamed prominent crew members, who took the actor to task for her comments. The letter shamed Fox for not appreciating Bay “plucking her from obscurity” and turning her into “one of the most googled and oogled women on Earth.” It also talked about how rude and unprofessional she was, and how she had the press “fooled.”

Meanwhile, Bay played the magnanimous part, choosing to publicly take the high road over both Fox’s comments and the cruelest parts of the open letter. He updated his website with a message condoning neither message, saying Fox’s “crazy quips are part of her crazy charm.” Executive producer Steven Spielberg, a Jewish filmmaker who had made perhaps the most significant U.S. film about the Holocaust with 1993’s “Schindler’s List,” might have disagreed. The public battle had seen some resolution, but the private battle was heating up.

Fox entered into rehearsals for “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” and Bay warned her publicly to “consult your physician when working under my direction because some side effects can occur.” Behind the scenes, Bay was reportedly verbally abusive to Fox, leading to her ultimate decision to quit. But Bay told GQ that Spielberg told him to “fire her right now” after the Hitler comments, and star Shia LaBeouf made a point of calling out her “public name-calling.”

Having severed his professional relationship with the series’s female lead, Bay was forced to cast a new love interest for Sam. The director had a professional obligation to have the movie out by July 1, 2011, and he was going to do it.

New love interest

Speaking on a behind the scenes featurette for “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” Michael Bay claimed that he let Megan Fox go because she had gotten cosmetic work done and “just didn’t look like Mikaela.” A far cry from following the righteous instruction of Steven Spielberg.

No matter what the cause of the split really was, its happening so close to the start of production presented a number of new issues for the movie. Even though Michael Bay has a reputation for working quickly, efficiently, and with improvisatory skill (perhaps never to greater effect than in the lower-budget Bayhem of “Ambulance”), being down a lead actor was a pretty significant issue. So he, along with writer Ehren Kruger, began to figure out what they would do, and how to bring a new character on instead who could fulfill Mikaela’s plot function: a new girlfriend character.

While Bay claimed about 400 or 500 women auditioned for the part of Sam Witwicky’s new love interest, only English model Rosie Huntington-Whitely really stuck out, and the part of Carly Spencer, Sam’s new girlfriend, was designed for her. If she lacked for some of the electric appeal generated by Fox, she fit perfectly within Bay’s cinematic vision. As producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura said on the behind the scenes featurette, the new relationship brought “a freshness and a vitality that really serves the story.” While Carly Spencer might have given the movie a new feeling that set it apart from the first two films, Megan Fox was missed.

Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/1348153/how-transformers-dealt-with-megan-fox-departure/