Terminator 5/Terminator reboot
I'm torn about this one — on the one hand, another
Terminator movie seems totally unnecessary, and
Terminator Salvation was a powerful argument in favor of just letting the series die. On the other hand, the basic idea of time-traveling cyborgs wreaking havoc and smashing shit up is just full of boundless possibilities for awesome. And the one major change
Salvation did to the
Terminator universe was to make it more like
Transformers. So why not just embrace it, and make a totally crazypants
Terminator movie with giant robots, like pretty much only Michael Bay can? John Connor could be a young guy searching to figure out who he is, with his best friend a quirky cyborg trying to protect him from all the other cyborgs.
Planet Hulk
If
The Avengers is as mega-successful as everybody expects, then Marvel may eventually decide that the third time's a charm for a Hulk movie. And there's pretty much one Hulk storyline that we'd kill to see on the big screen: Greg Pak's masterwork, where Bruce gets exiled to the planet Sakaar and forced to fight as a gladiator — until he leads a rebellion. It's basically like
John Carter meets the
Incredible Hulk, and the movie version would require one thing: a capacity for sheer, joyful destruction and craziness. Although there are a lot of supporting characters who need a fair bit of real character development, like Miek, so you'd need a strong screenwriter involved. Whatever happened, it would probably be the greatest Bayhem of his career. Seriously.
Robot Jox remake
This one is sort of a no-brainer — this underappreciated 1990 movie has many of the same elements as the
Transformers movies, including huge machines pounding the stuffing out of each other. But it also opens up a lot of scope for fun human drama, and would allow Bay to stretch his creative muscles. It's 50 years after a nuclear apocalypse, and war has been abolished. Instead, the two great superpowers now settle their differences the sensible way: with giant mecha gladitorial matches. Achilles, the pilot of one of the great giant battlesuits, wants to retire — but he keeps getting pulled back in, and meanwhile there's corruption and conspiracy all around him. Put the female mecha pilot Athena into some booty shorts and add a funny sidekick, and you've got a Michael Bay movie right here.
Spy Hunter
He drives around, shooting spies on the highway. It's like the perfect setup. But Michael Bay could add whole layers of meaning to this simple premise — for one thing, he would have to jump his car over explosions on the highway, while shooting at enemy helicopters. And you need a sexy female mechanic named Red, who can fix the car while it's still going top speed. But for another, the eponymous Spy Hunter would be faced with the difficulty of figuring out who's a spy while going 100 miles per hour. Any car on the highway could theoretically be driven by a spy — so how do you figure out which is which, without ever slowing down? You
trust your heart, that's how, and you man up, and you drive like gangbusters, until you run every last spy off the road. It writes itself.
Evangelion
After
watching the first two full-length movie versions of this anime classic, we're trying to imagine which U.S. director could possibly bring to life the giant-mecha-suit-vs.-weird-angels action, plus all of the angst and daddy issues. And the somewhat incesty teen sexuality, complete with ogling and inexpressible longing. It's a whole bundle of Freudian
schmutz, mixed up with supermassive explosions and giant combat. And if someone actually decent wrote the screenplay, we bet Michael Bay could film the hell out of this.
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