“It’s horrible.” With these two simple words, Steve Jobs expressed his opinion for which he was one of the most profitable franchises in history: transformers. He never managed to see one of his films in full. He didn’t like anything. He never specified exactly what led him to have this opinion, but it was so.
Transformers is undoubtedly one of the most successful sagas in all of history. There are seven films, and the last one premiered here in USA a few days ago. It was the biggest grosser of the week and only reached $60.5 million in the United States. It looks great, and it’s likely that this editor will check it out at some point.
A call kept us from seeing a killer iPod
During the shooting of the first film, Michael Bay, its director, thought of incorporating an iPod into it. In fact, some rumors in 2007 spoke of the possible incorporation of a 12-inch Apple music player that would become a a small but effective killing machine.
When Steve Jobs found out what Michael Bay was planning, he called him directly and told him not to think about it. Jobs was terribly angry and terrified. Not just because he didn’t like Transformers, but obviously no one with half a brain and a modicum of PR knowledge would allow make your star device a lethal weapon in the fifth highest-grossing film of the year. It would be commercial suicide.
Eventually, and how could it be otherwise, Transformers management had to relent and they ended up signing a deal with Nokia. We are not saying that their loss of popularity since then is due to the strange robot – which we leave you below – in which they turned their phone at the time, but Of course, the causal relationship is curious..
The upshot of this story is that if you rewatch the early Transformers movies, you won’t find a single iPhone or Apple product that turns into a robot. Much less in one of the bad. Yes, some products come out, like a MacBook in the 2007 movie or a Thunderbolt display in the 2009 movie, but nothing out of the ordinary.
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