Would you, if encountering Lorenzo di Bonaventura incognito, be surprised to hear that, as a producer and sometime studio head, he is one of the most powerful men in Hollywood? Maybe not. He is a big fellow with a confident presence. But, dressed today as if for an afternoon in front of the telly, he spreads an unpretentious bonhomie about the room. I suspect that if he really let himself go “off the record” he would enjoy exploding a few myths. He’s pottering as I enter the basement room of a posh Soho hotel.
“Oh, yeah, I worked in Dublin and Belfast,” he opens upon spotting my accent.
I should have known that. What did he shoot there?
“It was prior to my movie career,” he says. “I worked for a company that was based out of Belfast. It was a house-building company. They developed real estate and they owned radio stations. And I was based in the industrial park where the DeLorean company was.”
I remember it well. When, in the early 1980s, the train from Belfast to Dublin passed through Dunmurry, you saw rows of slate-grey automobiles – later immortalised in Back to the Future – ranged in poignantly hopeful rows.
Anyway, by the early 1990s, di Bonaventura, a Harvard graduate from New Hampshire, had swapped Ulster-based real estate for the life of a Hollywood executive. He eventually became president of worldwide production at Warner Bros, where he helped launch the Harry Potter and Matrix franchises.
As a credited producer, he has been associated with big, big movies that cost (and make) a great deal of money. He was behind the GI Joe series. He made the Red films with Bruce Willis. But the hugest of his behemoths has been the Transformers franchise. Ultimately deriving from a Hasbro toy line launched in 1984, the sequence of science-fiction adventures – the first five of which were directed bombastically by Michael Bay – have taken in about $5.3 billion, or about €4.75 billion.
We meet as the franchise looks to be attempting the blockbuster version of back to basics. Bay’s Transformers emerged in 2007. But the very first film in the wider franchise was a 1986 spin-off from the animated TV series. The knockabout, quippy Transformers One features the voices of Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry in an origin story for the centuries-spanning dispute between Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, and Megatron, chief of the Decepticons. Once again we are in cartoon land. It’s a family film. And if the early positive reviews (a rare thing for Transformers) are any measure, it could prove to be a crowd-pleaser.
“If you could say a two-billion-year-ago story is a prequel, then I guess it is,” di Bonaventura says. “But the truth is it’s really a standalone film. Right? We’ve learned a lot about how to manage robots cinematically. So that has definitely had an effect on how we were able to animate this.”
We talk in early summer as the industry reels from perceived box-office disappointments such as The Fall Guy and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. As it happens, a few days after our interview, Inside Out 2 will open enormously and go on to become the highest-grossing animated film of all time (go figure).
Deadpool & Wolverine and Despicable Me 4 were also smashes. But when the days were still getting longer, di Bonaventura could be forgiven for biting his fingernails. Then again, he doesn’t seem the nervous type.
“You know, there’s always the luck of the draw on this one,” he says. “It’s to do with what else is in the marketplace. When we talk about the business aspect of this, the opportunity is that we can draw in a new family audience. Because this is the beginning, And therefore you can expand the audience. This is so true to the origin story. And there are so many things a hardcore fan would like. It should please that group as well.”
He could well be right. But let’s tease out that perceived crisis in theatrical exhibition. Never before has the late screenwriter William Goldman’s famous maxim about the business been more useful: “Nobody knows anything.” A film with starry cast gets good reviews. It looks like a mainstream entity. It arrives at an otherwise quiet weekend. Yet the punters stay away in their droves. Then they rush back for an animated sequel.
I’ve read so much ‘Michael Bay is going to ruin my childhood’. And then he makes the movie and they all love the movie. Ha ha!
“Covid really hurt our business,” di Bonaventura says. “People got really inured to streaming and to the simplicity of staying at home. We were fighting video games. Now we’re fighting streaming – fighting both of them. We are in a challenging timeframe. But I personally think if you make a movie that’s good enough it’s still going to work. I haven’t really liked the movies that haven’t performed. It’s a shame. I want every movie to work, whether it’s mine or anybody else’s, because you want a healthy box office. But the ones I’ve seen aren’t giving the audience what they want.”
So has something fundamentally gone wrong? Is there now a glitch in the machine? What can Hollywood do to recapture the market place?
“One thing is we stopped making R-rated films,” he says.
He is referring to the American certificate that allows those under 17 entry only if accompanied by an adult. The US industry is maybe overly obsessed with ratings, but just look how well the R-rated Deadpool & Wolverine did.
“We hurt our most important audience, which was young males,” di Bonaventura continues. “They were the most active. Right? So we’re struggling to get young males today. It doubly hurt because they’ve got hard Rs in video games. So now we really screwed ourselves with that audience. This green-light committee bullshit that has occurred where there are 12 people who decide on whether a movie gets made or not? That means you end up with vanilla. Right? If you put 12 people in a room they will not agree on chocolate or strawberry. They will agree on vanilla.”
He is getting properly evangelical here. You can tell this matters to him.
“The other thing is that, as the studios have become more corporate, they have become more intrusive in the storytelling. They are not letting the film-makers tell the stories. I look back as a former studio executive. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. And we were really not all that intrusive.”
He nudges me towards a related issue with the current project. Merchandising became a large part of the movie economy way back with Star Wars. But there was a sense with Transformers – even with the first TV series – that the entertainment had been conceived specifically to sell the toys. After all, Hasbro Entertainment’s logo is up there on the screen with that of Paramount Animation. Is he comfortable with that relationship?
“Maybe I am too craven, but I don’t see the issue with that,” he says. “We’ve done 10 movies together, Hasbro and I. I’m conscious of their business. I want their business to be well. They’ve never dictated something to me. They’ve never said, ‘You have to do this.’ It wouldn’t work for me if they did that. Yes, it’s going to be a good toy. But I don’t have to adjust it. So I have no qualms about it.”
Fair enough. There is another body that seeks to apply pressure. The fans. Grown adults have, as the Transformers series progressed, eaten up acres of the internet expressing concern at how their childhood enthusiasms are about to be annihilated. I wonder how he processes all that.
“That part is harder,” he says. “At first it was, like, ‘Oh God, what are we going to do?’ But I’ve read so much ‘Michael Bay is going to ruin my childhood’. And then he makes the movie and they all love the movie. Ha ha!”
Transformers One is in cinemas from Friday, October 11th
