This report starts with a huge, freakin flop. Yes, I'm talking about The Island. The final box office numbers aren't in yet (keep checking back to the site for Scott to break them down later today) but it's obvious that what is clearly Michael Bay's absolute best film is a total and utter box office failure. Bay has been on tap to direct the upcoming Transformers movie, but could this scare the studio off, and leave Bay out in the cold? Could the folks behind Transformers be looking for another director?

Transformers producer Don Murphy has been rather firmly pointing out for a few weeks now that while Bay is a sure thing, he isn't fully locked yet. Now, on his message board Murphy is talking about other possible candidates with fans. Bay still seems like he's the man, but perhaps his position just got a lot shakier. While he was at it, Murphy also threw this out there, "see I don't know how to break it to you there is NO script". They might want to have one of those, if the movie is to be done in time for its release date in 2007. Murphy also points out that they might need one of those script things before Bay or anyone else can really be locked in as director, "He is not on till there is a script"

At the same time, IESB.net is running an interview with Lorenzo di Bonaventura where they ask him a few questions about the upcoming film. Bonaventura finally put to rest all the argument about whether the original voice actors should handle the robot's voices in the film: "I don't believe that is going to happen, I don't know why you would want the original voice over actors." There's no accounting for psycho fans Lenny. I don't get it either… who cares? "I think kind of silly actually. I think people want the best actors to do it. The best Optimus Prime and the best you know, all these characters, you know you want , hmm, I understand I grew up with them too, so you want to be true to characters. I think what's important is being true to them. I don't think being true to them means in literally using the same voice over actors. Some of those guys are TV cartoon guy's. I want get better characters if we can. Some of them might be able to do that and some may not, I am sure that they will get the opportunity." Good news if you ask me. Cartoon voices are fine for cartoons, but let's find the right people for the movie roles, thanks. Maybe we can finally stuff a rag in the mouth of the fanboy movement to bring in Casey Kasem.

To make things further confusing, CHUD.com has a little different info out of di Bonaventura from the same junket. They talked to him about what direction they're going with the script, which according to Don Murphy does not exist: "It’s both. It’s hard. Transformers is really tricky because we took a picture of one of the Transformers as constructed in the show and we put it out in the field and it looked really goofy. And I’m saying this as a fan. When you put it into reality, it demands a different thing, and that’s what the struggle is – to try to make it more real and more relatable to a broader audience than the original series was. We’re going to go through some fits and starts where we figure out how much of the robots can we handle and how much of the kid can we handle. It’s really sort of finding the balance of the two things." Sounds like a big, boiling pot of excuses. By now we've all seen the car commercials and other fan made Transformer video clips which put photorealistic transforming robots into the real world. They all look REALLY good. Yes, if you take a picture of a toy and photoshop it into a field it'll look like crap, but I think we've adequately proven now that it can be done, and done right. What's with the lame excuses? Sounds like a prelude to Dakota Fanning casting to me.

And just to lighten things up while Transformers sinks into total confusion and meltdown, here's something really really creepy. TransformersLive.com has a bizarre video from the guy really running the Transformers show, Steven Spielberg. The Berg talks about how much he likes to play with Transformers. Not watch them, or make movies about them… no the man has for the past twenty years been sneaking into toy stores and buying them when no one is looking then he takes them home and "manipulates" them. I'm not sure if I should laugh or hide my children… hearing that from Spielberg sounds incredibly weird. CLICK HERE to be creeped the heck out.