A decade ago, movies based on brands and products were universally terrible, the kind of thing an actor or filmmaker might do between passion projects to keep the pond full of koi carp.
Audiences had just been battered around the heads by a fourth Transformers movie, which grossed more than $1 billion, and were still recovering from Battleship. Despite casting Rihanna as a Navy gunner’s mate trying to stop an alien invasion, this extrapolation of the popular armada-sinking tabletop game lost Hasbro and Universal about $150 million.
