We’re getting another big Super Bowl ad a little early this morning, with Paramount/Viacom Inc. debuting a TV spot for Transformers: The Last Knight. Like the previous Super Bowl teases for the Transformers sequels, this is a grim and self-serious sell promising a more ponderous and prestigious offering. Maybe this time it isn’t a bluff, but we’ll see soon enough.

We’re allegedly getting a slightly longer version of said ad on Sunday night, but the debut was preceded by a statement from director Michael Bay proclaiming that this would be his final Transformers film. He has said that before. But with Paramount attempting to expand the franchise into something resembling a cinematic universe (the sixth Transformers movie due on June 8, 2018 is allegedly a smaller-scale Bumblebee spin-off), this fifth chapter seems to be a backdoor pilot for whatever comes next and one last ride for the director who ended up making five installments of a single franchise. That’s actually somewhat remarkable, even in this franchise-heavy era.

Steven Spielberg directed four Indiana Jones movies with a fifth on the way in July of 2019. Justin Lin directed the middle four chapters of the Fast and Furious series and David Yates directed the final four Harry Potter films and may yet end up directing all five of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them installments. And Peter Jackson made three Lord of the Rings movies and then (reluctantly) went back a decade later and made three Hobbit films in the same universe. But Bay is (thus far) the first director since John Glen, who directed five 007 movies from 1981 to 1989, to helm five entries of a single ongoing franchise. Every time we think he’s out, they pull him back in.

To be fair, the three-year gap between the last two sequels has given the director time to do something a bit more personal in between Transformers sequels. So we got Pain and Gain between Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction and then 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi between Age of Extinction and the upcoming The Last Knight. As a general rule, when you give the actors and filmmakers time between installments they are that much more likely to come back. One of the reasons Hugh Jackman ended up playing Wolverine for 17 years is that he had plenty of time in between X-Men movies to do other movies, plays and awards-hosting gigs.

I am not going to paste Bay’s entire farewell address, but I will share a portion…

“It’s bittersweet for me. With every Transformers film, I’ve said it would be my last. I see the 120 million fans around the world who see these movies, the huge theme park lines to the ride and the amazing Make- A-Wish kids who visit my sets, and it somehow keeps drawing me back. I love doing these movies. This film was especially fun to shoot. But, this time might really be it. So I’m blowing this one out.”

Point being, as much as we pundits and critics decry these films as the death of cinema or hold them up as the rare blockbuster franchise that makes mega-bucks despite consistently terrible reviews, the movies do have a fan base.  The over/under $1 billion worldwide global totals don’t materialize out of thin air. And it’s not that the films are critic-proof, but rather that each installment delivers exactly what fans want in a Transformers movie.