Director Michael Bay has been making Transformers movies for the better part of the last decade, with the most recent installment budgeted just north of $200 million and raking in more than $1 billion at the worldwide box office, but now that Bay intends to turn the blockbuster franchise over to someone new, it seems he’s keen on making something smaller and more serious.
Per the The Hollywood Reporter, Bay is circling 13 Hours, a political drama about the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. State Department compound in Benghazi, which left one U.S. Ambassador and three other Americans dead. Chuck Hogan, who wrote the novel that became Ben Affleck’s The Town, is adapting the script from author Michael Zuckoff‘s book “13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi“. The film is set up at Paramount.
As a filmmaker, Bay gets a lot of flak these days, primarily because his most recent works are so blatantly style-over-substance. Perhaps a true telling of the Benghazi attack can change that, by forcing him to scale back and keep the focus on story and characters, instead of letting explosions alone fuel the narrative.
