Transformers Budget

What Is the Budget of Transformers (2007)?

Transformers (2007), directed by Michael Bay, executive produced by Steven Spielberg and released by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures, had a production budget of $150,000,000. That is the figure Box Office Mojo lists and the one producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Ian Bryce gave Reuters at release, when they called it a bargain next to that summer's other tentpoles, which cost as much as $300,000,000. Bay himself told Collider he had $145,000,000 to work with. The Numbers lists $151,000,000, while NPR's Kim Masters reported that a Hollywood source put the real cost above $200,000,000. Saturation uses $150,000,000, the number the producers gave publicly, and treats $145,000,000 to $151,000,000 as the reported range, with the NPR figure as an unconfirmed upper estimate.

The budget was held down by deals rather than cuts. Bay gave up 30% of his fee to keep the shoot in Los Angeles with his regular crew instead of moving to Canada or Australia, General Motors supplied most of the Autobots' vehicles in a product placement deal that saved $3,000,000, and the U.S. Armed Forces provided aircraft, bases and soldiers as extras. The film was a co-production of Paramount, DreamWorks, Hasbro and di Bonaventura Pictures, released under the DreamWorks banner in the United States and Canada and the Paramount banner overseas.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

Paramount has never published a line-item budget for Transformers, but the production record shows where the money went and where it was saved.

• Visual Effects: Industrial Light & Magic created about three quarters of the effects and Digital Domain the rest, including Megatron frozen in the Arctic and the Autobots' protoforms. ILM spent six months in 2005 on the transformations, and Bay said a single frame took 38 hours to render, which forced ILM to expand its processing capacity. Turning one robot wrist needed 17 visible parts, and each of Ironhide's guns was built from ten thousand.
• Military Hardware and Bases: The U.S. Armed Forces supplied F-22s, F-117s and V-22 Ospreys, the first time those aircraft appeared in a film, along with A-10s, AC-130s, authentic uniforms and soldiers as extras. Because the Qatar base is destroyed on screen, most of the structures at Holloman Air Force Base were bought from AKS Military, a private maker of military shelters, rather than belonging to the base.
• Picture Cars: General Motors supplied the vehicle forms for most of the Autobots, including the Chevrolet Camaro used for Bumblebee, a deal that saved $3,000,000, and provided nearly 200 cars, most of them flood-damaged or unsaleable, to be wrecked in the climactic battle.
• Shooting Pace and Crew: Bay planned an 83-day schedule and said he averages about 75 camera set-ups a day against roughly 20 for a typical director, working 12-hour days without overtime. Keeping the production in Los Angeles cost him 30% of his directing fee.
• Practical Stunts and Destruction: Spielberg encouraged Bay to limit computer-generated imagery to the robots and backgrounds, so stunts such as Bonecrusher smashing through a bus were done for real, with cameras placed inside crashes and explosions. The Mission City finale took six weekends to shoot in Los Angeles.

How Does Transformers' Budget Compare to Similar Films?

At $150,000,000, Transformers was one of the cheaper tentpoles of summer 2007, a season of sequels that cost far more. Figures below are Box Office Mojo's, across all releases.

• Spider-Man 3 (2007): Budget $258,000,000 | Worldwide $887,415,130. The summer's most expensive superhero sequel cost $108,000,000 more and grossed $177,705,350 more, but it returned 3.4 times its budget against Transformers' 4.7 times.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007): Budget $300,000,000 | Worldwide $961,691,209. The most expensive film of the summer sits at the top of the range the producers cited when they called Transformers a bargain; it cost twice as much and grossed 35.5% more.
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007): Budget $150,000,000 | Worldwide $939,165,729. The same budget, released eight days later; the fifth Potter film earned 68.9% of its gross overseas and outgrossed Transformers worldwide, but Transformers took $26,863,466 more in the United States and Canada.
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009): Budget $200,000,000 | Worldwide $836,304,167. The sequel cost 33% more and grossed 17.8% more worldwide, with a domestic total of $402,111,870 that beat the original by 26%.
• Bumblebee (2018): Budget $135,000,000 | Worldwide $467,989,645. The franchise's spin-off about Bumblebee cost $15,000,000 less and grossed 34% less, earning 72.8% of its total outside North America.

Transformers Box Office Performance

Transformers opened in 10 international markets, including Australia and South Korea, on June 28, 2007, taking $29,500,000 in its first weekend. In the United States and Canada it started with 8 p.m. previews on July 2 that earned $8,800,000, took $27,800,000 on its first full day, a Tuesday record at the time, and set a Fourth of July record of $29,000,000, beating Spider-Man 2 (2004). Its first Friday to Sunday weekend brought in $70,502,384 from 4,011 theaters, and its opening week reached $155,400,000, the biggest for a film that was not a sequel, ahead of Spider-Man (2002). The opening ran 50% ahead of what Paramount had expected.

It finished with $319,246,193 in the United States and Canada and $390,463,587 internationally, for $709,709,780 worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. Paramount and DreamWorks never reported what they spent on marketing, so the investment, net return and ROI rows below are left blank rather than estimated.

Transformers was the highest-grossing film of 2007 that was not a sequel, third at the domestic box office behind Spider-Man 3 and Shrek the Third (2007), and fifth worldwide. Its international total was led by the United Kingdom at $48,603,202, China at $37,218,823, where it became the second biggest foreign film at the time behind Titanic (1997), South Korea at $36,079,196 and Japan at $34,299,435. The theatrical run was only part of the return: The Numbers estimates domestic DVD and Blu-ray sales at $305,127,221, the DVD sold 8.3 million copies in its first week and 13.74 million in all, the most popular DVD title of 2007, and Hasbro's merchandise for the film earned $480,000,000 that year.

Transformers Production History

The film began as a different Hasbro property. Producer Don Murphy was developing G.I. Joe, a property that later reached screens as G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009), but after the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, Hasbro suggested Transformers instead. Tom DeSanto joined Murphy and wrote a treatment from a human point of view, and Steven Spielberg, a fan of the toys and comics, signed on as executive producer in 2004. John Rogers wrote the first draft, and Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were hired to rewrite it in February 2005, building the story around Spielberg's idea of "a boy and his car." The project used the fake working title Prime Directive.

Spielberg asked Michael Bay to direct on July 30, 2005. Bay initially dismissed it as a "stupid toy movie," changed his mind after visiting Hasbro, and found the first draft "too kiddie," so he expanded the military storyline. Shia LaBeouf was cast as Sam Witwicky, with Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro and Jon Voight. Peter Cullen returned to voice Optimus Prime nearly twenty years after the original 1980s cartoon ended, while Hugo Weaving voiced Megatron after Bay decided Frank Welker's voice did not fit.

A pre-shoot took place on April 19, 2006, and principal photography began three days later at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, which stood in for Qatar. At White Sands Missile Range the ground had to be swept for unexploded ordnance before the village set for the Scorponok attack could be built, and Air Force battle managers aboard an AWACS plane improvised their dialogue as if the fight were real. The crew then shot at the Hoover Dam on the Nevada and Arizona border and at the Pentagon in Virginia, the first film crews allowed at either location since the September 11 attacks; the dam exteriors were filmed before tourists arrived at 10 a.m. each day.

Production in California was based at the former Hughes Aircraft site in Playa Vista, where the hangar holding the frozen Megatron was built. The crew filmed at Griffith Observatory while it was still closed for renovation, spent six weekends in Los Angeles on the climactic battle, and added material on the Universal Studios backlot and at Michigan Central Station in Detroit, Michigan. Filming wrapped on October 4, 2006. Steve Jablonsky, who had scored Bay's The Island (2005), recorded the score at the Sony Scoring Stage in Culver City in April 2007 with help from his mentor Hans Zimmer.

Transformers had its world premiere at N Seoul Tower in Seoul on June 10, 2007, the first time a Hollywood film held its opening event in South Korea, followed by the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 27 and a charity premiere in Hasbro's home state of Rhode Island on June 28. An IMAX version with extra footage followed on September 21. The film launched a franchise that continued with Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023).

Awards and Recognition

Transformers was recognized almost entirely for its sound and visual effects.

• Academy Awards: Three nominations at the 80th Academy Awards, for Best Sound Editing (Ethan Van der Ryn and Mike Hopkins), Best Sound Mixing (Kevin O'Connell, Greg P. Russell and Peter J. Devlin) and Best Visual Effects (Scott Benza, Russell Earl, Scott Farrar and John Frazier).
• Visual Effects Society Awards: Won four awards from five nominations at the 6th VES Awards, including Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Feature Motion Picture and Best Single Visual Effect of the Year for the desert highway sequence, plus Models and Miniatures and Compositing. Optimus Prime was nominated for Outstanding Performance by an Animated Character.
• Saturn Awards: Won Best Special Effects and was nominated for Best Science Fiction Film.
• MTV Movie Awards: Won Best Movie in 2008, a year after winning Best Summer Movie You Haven't Seen Yet.
• Music and Other Honors: Steve Jablonsky received a BMI Film Music Award, the film won a jury merit award for special effects at the 2007 Kuala Lumpur International Film Festival, and Scott Farrar was named Visual Effects Supervisor of the Year at the Hollywood Film Festival.
• Golden Raspberry Awards: Jon Voight was nominated for Worst Supporting Actor, a nomination shared with three of his other 2007 films.

Critical Reception

Reviews were mixed, but audiences were enthusiastic. Transformers holds 57% on Rotten Tomatoes from 227 critics and a Metacritic score of 61 out of 100 from 35 critics, indicating generally favorable reviews, while its Rotten Tomatoes audience score is 85%. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an A, rising to an A+ among viewers under 18. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus reads: "While believable characters are hard to come by in Transformers, the effects are staggering and the action is exhilarating."

Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars, calling it "goofy fun with a lot of stuff that blows up real good," with "the grace not only to realize how preposterous it is, but to make that into an asset." IGN's Todd Gilchrist called it Bay's best film, and Ian Nathan of Empire praised Shia LaBeouf as "a smart, natural comedian." The criticism centered on the human storylines: Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times found the humans "oddly lifeless, doing little besides marking time until those big toys fill the screen," and CNN's Tom Charity wondered "if Hollywood could possibly aim lower." Critics broadly agreed that the robots and the effects, not the script, were the reason to see it.