As much as any movie-lover may enjoy the theatrical experience, I think it’s safe to say that we all have a breaking point. Sometimes a film is just so bad that it is not worth your time anymore, and the exit looks far more appealing than the idea of seeing a feature through to the end credits. You get out of your seat, and you walk out.
For Stephen King, this is evidently an impulse that doesn’t strike often, but there is one recent blockbuster that he says he was unwilling to sit through when he went to go see it on the big screen: Michael Bay’s 2007 his Transformers.
This revelation comes to us via the author’s popular Twitter account, and came up in a response to a Tweet from another writer, namely crime novelist Linwood Barclay. After Barclay wrote that Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World: Dominion is the first film he’s “walked out on in years,” King replied with his walk out story, and an urge for his followers to share their’s:
I have walked out of only one movie as an adult: TRANSFORMERS. Would like to know what other movies people have walked out on.
And in case there was any confusion regarding precisely which Transformers movie Stephen King didn’t see through to the end, he specifically identified Michael Bay’s first live-action Transformers blockbuster when a follower inquired:
Michael Bay. The first one. https://t.co/WZ5TXeKREmJune 28, 2022
When it comes to pop culture criticism on social media, Stephen King generally likes to keep things positive, whether he is trumpeting the excellence of Yellowjackets or urging movie-goers to check out James Wan’s Malignant. That being said, he’s not a critic who practices the idea of “if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” He’s never been too shy about lambasting adaptations of his own work that he feels didn’t work, and it was almost exactly a year ago that he revealed what he considers to be the worst horror movie ever made.
It seems fair to assume that Stephen King has not attempted to give Transformers another go in the years since its theatrical release and give it a new appraisal (he’s explained that he doesn’t make a habit of rewatching things), and it’s worth noting that he is far from alone in his judgement of the Michael Bay movie. Of course, the blockbuster also has a great number of fans, and it was the fifth biggest hit at the box office in 2007.
If you haven’t seen Transformers for yourself and want to see if you can last longer watching it than Stephen King, the film is available to stream with an HBO Max subscription, and you can rent/purchase it digitally from Google Play (opens in new tab), Amazon (opens in new tab), and Vudu (opens in new tab).