Michael Bay is a Genius

For Yahoo!'s Top Ten Domestic Grossing Films of 2009, do the clickity click.

Michael Bay is a big, fat idiot. Luckily for him, so is the general moviegoing public. Let's take a look at the films he's directed in his career and how much they've pulled in worldwide.


1995: Bad Boys - $141M

Review: It's all special-effects noise and nonsense.

1996: The Rock - $335M

Consensus: For visceral thrills, it can't be beat. Just don't expect The Rock to engage your brain.

1998: Armageddon - $554M

Review: You know you're in trouble when Deep Impact dwarfs your asteroid movie in terms of emotion and scope.

2001: Pearl Harbor - $450M

Consensus: Pearl Harbor tries to be the Titanic of war movies, but it's just a tedious romance filled with laughably bad dialogue.

2003: Bad Boys II - $273M

Consensus: Two and a half hours of explosions and witless banter.

2005: The Island - $100M

Consensus: A clone of THX 1183, Coma, and Logan's Run, The Island is another loud and bombastic Michael Bay movie where explosions and chases matter more than characters, dialogue, or plot.

2005: The Amityville Horror - $108M

Consensus: A so-so remake of a so-so original.

2007: Transformers - $708M

Consensus: While believable characters are hard to come by in Transformers, the effects are staggering and the action is exhilarating.

2009: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - $833M

Consensus: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a noisy, underplotted, and overlong special effects extravaganza that lacks a human touch.

And there you go. For those of you keeping score, that's one positive consensus (The Rock) out of 9 tries. And for you math wizards out there, Bay's 9 directorial efforts have grossed just over $3.5 billion worldwide.

Three. Point. Five. Billion. More than the GDPs of Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Swaziland and Barbados. If Bay is clinically depressed by the lack of recognition from film critics and those of us who aren't mouth breathers, I'd say he can buy himself some pretty effective therapy.

Because one can only bitch and moan about absurdly rich directors who value special effects over plot and character development so long before it gets tiresome, check out classics from Fake Michael Bay on Twitter. It's almost worth creating a Twitter profile just to follow this guy.