Michael Bay Biography

Michael Bay is an American movie producer and director famous for the explosion-filled excitement of movies such as The Rock (1996) and Transformers (2007).

A Los Angeles native, Michael Bay studied film at Wesleyan University (class of 1986) and then at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design (class of 1988). He quickly made a name for himself as a director of music videos and TV commercials; perhaps most notably, Bay made the first spot in the “Got Milk?” campaign.

His first feature film as a director was 1995’s Bad Boys, an action comedy starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. The movie was a box office smash, the first of a string of Michael Bay “high-octane” hits that includes the prison-break drama The Rock (1996, with Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery), the end-of-the-world asteroid special Armageddon (1998, starring Bruce Willis), the sequel Bad Boys II (2003) and the battle-in-Benghazi actioner 13 Hours (2013). His 2001 blockbuster Pearl Harbor was loudly booed by the critics, as was 2005’s The Island, but Bay was too busy piling up money to notice.

As a producer, Michael Bay has been behind a line of horror films and remakes that includes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Amityville Horror (2005), Friday the 13th (2009), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) and Ouija: Origin of Evil (2013).

For all that, the Transformer franchise has become Michael Bay’s signature. The series is about battling mechanical beings from the planet Cybertron who bring their civil war to Earth. (It’s all based on a long-running line of toys, also called Transformers, which are cars that turn into robots.)

The 2007 film Transformers starred Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox and brought in over $700 million in global box office. It was followed by Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and then Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), which did over $1 billion at the box office worldwide. Bay has since directed Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) and Transformers: The Last Knight (2017). Together the Transformer films have grossed more than four billion dollars worldwide, making them one of the most lucrative franchises in movie history.