Jan. 19--Rumored for a few weeks now, director Michael Bay confirmed that the fifth installment of his "Tranformers" franchise will return to Chicago.
Talking with WGN Radio's Dean Richards, Bay said he plans to be back in Chicago sometime later this year. The film is scheduled for a 2017 release, with plans already in the works for two more "Transformers" movies after that. Billion-dollar revenues will do that.
"You going to blow up Michigan Avenue again?" Richards asks Bay in his interview (at the 5:40 mark). "No, we're gonna find a new street," Bay said. "But I love Chicago." And then, referring to some of the city's systemic problems, including gun violence, added dryly: "We'll come in with some Transformers to even it out."
"Transformers: Dark of the Moon" (No. 3) and "Transformers: Age of Extinction" (No. 4) both filmed in Chicago, the former substantially more.
In 2014, Chicago-based film critic Kevin Lee released a terrific "desktop" documentary called "Transformers: The Premake" that chronicled and assembled "pre-production footage captured by hundreds of bystanders who used their phones to film the crew when it was shooting in Chicago, Detroit, Texas, China and several other locations ... that reveals deeper themes about the way Hollywood films tend to bigfoot their way around and the increasing prominence of China as an audience movie executives want to exploit." (I wrote about the film here, which is available for free on YouTube.)
nmetz@tribpub.com
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