By Steven Zeitchik

We knew something was a little zealous about the dating for the next Transformers — we mean, the next next Transformers — when Paramount announced Monday it would keep on the bi-annual schedule and make a third picture in the reborn franchise for July 2011.

After all, when we interviewed director Michael Bay back in February, he sounded genuinely tired of the car-slash-robots — and he was still working feverishly in post on this one. Bay said in the interview that Par and DreamWorks were wondering if he might be up for a summer date even as early 2010 (hmm, someone needs a franchise) and he was basically telling them hold on a minute, I'm not sure I want to push that hard.

He was, he said, working on the "Cocaine Cowboys" series that he and Jerry Bruckheimer are making for HBO, and that once he emerged from postproduction madness, he wanted to concentrate on that.

Now apparently this little push-pull Bay was having with the studio has spilled out in public. The director said on his blog Tuesday that "Paramount made a mistake in dating Transformers 3 – they asked me on the phone – I said yes to July 4 – but for 2012 – whoops! Not 2011!!!

So someone really misheard something…on the phone? And a press release was issued without any further consultation? Very odd. Someone either got hasty (on the Par Side) or a change of heart (on the Bay side).

Either way, what all this shows is that perhaps the best negotiating tactic when a studio's pushing you to work on a movie you don't want to work on is simply your old friend Typepad. (And you thought it was CAA.)

Besides giving a whole different meaning to Paramount's tagline for Transformers 2, seen on the poster here, of "We are here, We are waiting," the kicker in all this is Bay's comment for why he didn't want to deliver for 2011. "My brain needs a break from fighting robots," he said.

When even _Michael Bay_ is saying that…

By Steven Zeitchik

Sympathy aplenty to anyone doing a remake of an '80s horror vehicle. It's an almost unwinnable situation: take too many liberties and you're slammed for abandoning what brought you here; stick too close to the original and you're pilloried for a lack of imagination.

So we can't be too hard on the new "Friday the 13th," which New Line premiered at the Chinese on Monday the 9th. The Michael Bay-produced pic has some elements that work (good scares; amusing comic relief, an, um, killer opening sequence that defies convention) and some that don't (an earnestness that sees victims getting knocked off  in the usual one-by-one horror pattern, a reluctance to push or offer surprises on the Jason mythology).

Mostly it's Jason taking blade, knife and assorted weapons to pretty young victims (prettier than the earlier victims, it should be noted). Director Marcus Nispel on the new-vs-old conundrum: "We had to make Jason leaner and meaner because he has a lot of damage to do in a short amount of time. But we also had to make sure he doesn't break Jason's laws and do things Jason would never do."

After all, there are fans who can be, um, noisy about the need for, and direction of, a remake. And they're not afraid to say so on assorted message boards. "It may only be four people, but when you're reading those message boards it can feel like an entire universe," says Brad Fuller, an exec at Bay's Platinum Dunes and producer on the pic.

Then again, this new installment may not exactly be the coda to the thirty-year-old franchise — it could be the beginning of a new one. While nothing's greenlit yet, we don't think we're giving away too much when we say the ending of this film leaves things more open than a flesh wound, offering not so much the final scene to this movie but the first scene of a new one.

At the afterparty on Monday, everyone — from writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift to producers at Platinum Dunes to star Jared Padelecki — was talking about it as though it was a very likely possibility.

And Nispel — already no stranger to remakes, having helmed a "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" reboot in 2003 — allowed that he may be back in too. "Jason has a way of coming back," Nispel said. "I said to my agent after 'Chainsaw' that I didn't want to do another '80s horror movie because people might get suspicious. But these things have a way of drawing me back in."

The ultimate barometer will of course be box-office, and Bay, for his part, isn't worried. "We made 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' for $9 million and look what it did (more than $100 million worldwide)," he said. "This is a movie we made for $17 million. By Monday morning everyone will be happy."

The director meanwhile has some other big numbers to go after — namely, the $700 million that "Transformers" made globally two summers ago — when "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" comes out in June.

The director waved aside the suggestions that the recent TV spot showcased the bulk of the excitement — "The Super Bowl is just a small part," he said — and also added that the pic, which he is currently working on, will differ substantially from the first one.  "We can do a lot more emotionally with the robots. We were just beginning to scratch the surface with the first," he said. On '80s properties, there's always more to scratch.

By Steven Zeitchik

If you engage in self-parody but most people don’t know who you are in the first place, isn’t it just parody?

Such is the question occasioned by a new television spot featuring Michael Bay. The director of quiet European melodramas like “Pearl Harbor” and “Transformers” is in a new concept commercial for Verizon’s FIOS TV, as Defamer tips, basically blowing things up in what’s supposed to spoof the idea of what life is like for a blow-it-up director like, well, Michael Bay. (For another take on this commercial and to view it, visit sibling blog Reel Pop.)

The Verizon press release (the same press release that calls him a “celebrity” and “a larger-than-life figure”) notes that “Bay deftly spoofs his own super-charged Hollywood persona.”

Well, here’s the thing, good people of the telecommunications industry who are trying to break into the entertainment industry. Bay may have thought he’s sending himself up. But the very fact that he regards himself as important enough to be sent up, when in fact the average American consumer probably has no idea who Michael Bay is, itself undermines the very self-knowledge he’s trying to project with the commercial in the first place.

Risky Biz Sr. has a saying about someone not knowing enough to be a heretic. We’d like to extend the rule to certain directors who attempt self-deprecation.

And if all that isn’t enough, Bay spent the strike writing “Transformers 2″ as the sharp-tongued people over at Cinematical remind us. Patric Verrone, we’ll never forgive you.