Do we like Michael Bay?
Our score: 5 out of 10. No harmful words of his own turned up, but contested accounts of how he treats people and a fresh legal fight keep him in the middle.
Bay is the bloke behind the loudest blockbusters going, and by his own account he likes a hands-on set. In a 2022 interview about Ambulance he said he has no trailer or director's chair and joked that he's the one splattering the blood on his actors. That's the brand: big, fast, practical and unapologetic.
The set stories are the main stain, and they are contested. Kate Beckinsale told The Graham Norton Show she was told to work out before Pearl Harbor and that Bay said he cast her because she wasn't so attractive she'd alienate female viewers. Bay called the reports of him not finding her attractive totally untrue and called her a fantastic actress. Megan Fox, after an old interview resurfaced in 2020, said that in her direct experience with Bay she was never assaulted or preyed upon in a sexual manner.
On the harm test, I found nothing. No reporting I read has him saying or doing anything against LGBTQ+ people, trans people, women's rights, migrants or the climate, and that's the honest gap. What he has done is work with the Trump-era state: he directed a Secret Service recruitment ad and posted that the President wanted to meet him before flying off on Air Force One.
The recent bit is bigger. His Iran rescue film for Universal is based on a Mitchell Zuckoff book, with Bay producing alongside Erwin Stoff. Bay said he has had an amazing partnership over his 30-year career with the Department of War and military members. Where you land depends on whether you see a salute to rescuers or a gloss on a war many people oppose.
Then there's the courtroom. In February Bay sued Cadillac's F1 team in Los Angeles for about $1.5 million, alleging it used his ideas for its Super Bowl ad after dropping him. Cadillac says the concept was finished before it spoke to him and that it is confident the dispute will be resolved. Separately, in 2023 The Wrap reported an Italian charge tied to a pigeon's death on a Netflix shoot; his lawyer called that report false, reckless and defamatory.
The good stuff is thin in what I could verify. I found no charity record I could open, so I won't invent one. What fans love him for is spectacle, not service. So this is a close call: not a villain, not a saint, and a bloke who mostly makes things explode.