Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura spoke a little early yesterday and announced that Michael Bay will be making Transformers 4 and Pain & Gain at Paramount.
While di Bonaventura talked about the news early with MTV, Paramount followed up quickly and made the announcement last night. The two-picture deal that Bay made will include Transformers 4 having a June 2014 release and his passion project Pain & Gain will be made with a $25 million budget.
It was rumored earlier that Transformers 4 & 5 would be back to back, but now the studio will be making one movie at a time. In April, Bay will start shooting Pain And Gain with Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson, and then move on to start development on Transformers 4. (I really want to call it Trans4mers). The new film will be "a new take on the Transformers franchise" that is based more closely on the toyline created by Hasbro.
Here's what di Bonaventura said:
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Moving away from Transformers, the second part of Bay's 2-pic deal will be Pain and Gain with Wahlberg and The Rock. The actors are reportedly deferring their compensation in exchange for a big back end. The purpose is to keep the project within it's $25 million budget level. The actors could have asked for much more being that they are both coming off of big movies.
The true story from the Miami New Times is centered around some Miami bodybuilders that come up with a scheme to kidnap and extort, but things go terribly wrong. Shooting on location in Miami, production is expected to start in April as previously mentioned.
“Michael has been working on Pain And Gain for a number of years but has patiently waited for the perfect casting to trigger a start,” Adam Goodman, President of Paramount’s Film Group, said in the press release. “Clearly his patience has paid off as we couldn’t be more excited about this combo. His passion for this project is just awesome.”
