Michael Bay should be banned from making new movies

It's unclear if Pro is stating that Michael Bay should be banned from making movies by the government or by production companies. If it's the former, there's a long history of shaky legal grounds for banning movies. Even when there's a seemingly legitimate legal basis for a ban, decisions often fail or end up being overturned later on. For example, the movie The Tin Drum which depicted 11 year old actor David Bennent ogling the 24 year old actress Katherina Thalbach's naked body and then running up and burying his face against her, eagerly performing oral sex. State District Court Judge Richard Freeman cited the state's obscenity laws (which prohibits "any individual under eighteen years of age who engages in the original or relayed transmission of obscene material or child pornography via electronic media in the form of digital images, videos, or other depictions of real persons under the age of eighteen years"[1]) in order to ban it. Copies of the film that had been distributed to video outlets were subsequently seized by state police as a result[2]. A week later, a lawsuit was filed against the officers[3] which snowballed into a number of hearings and the ban ended up being lifted[4]. And this was a case where a state law could be cited as having been violated. I know of no such law that could be cited to ban a movie on the grounds that its aesthetic value is questionable. So what chance would any attempt to ban movies on such a basis have? Even less of a chance than those that appear to violate a state law. I therefore conclude that any attempt to ban Michael Bay movies would be a waste of time and resources and should not be done. If Pro meant that it's the production companies that should impose such a ban (or, more accurately, a boycott), I would argue that this would also be pretty futile. Michael Bay founded his own production company Platinum Dunes in 2001 and it has played a big role in the production of a lot of his movies ever since[5]. A boycott from the likes of Paramount Pictures would be a setback to be sure, but it would be unlikely to stop him from making movies. It's also important to note that production companies are businesses. Their primary concern is profit. Michael Bay's movies make a lot of money. To use the 2 examples that Pro gave, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had a budget of 125 million and grossed over 493 million worldwide[6] and Transformers had a budget of 150 million and grossed over 709 million worldwide[7]. Good luck convincing a business to boycott a cash cow. It would be a waste of time to try and therefore should not be done. Now, I've dealt with how futile any attempt to impose a ban on Michael Bay movies would be. But I want to pretend that this isn't the case for a moment. Let's say that we can know for certain that a legal ban would be successful and/or that a production company boycott would force Michael Bay into retirement. Should it be done? The answer is still no. The elephant in the room here is the cliche that everyone has an opinion and every opinion is equally as valid as another when it comes to matters like preferences for certain musicians and films and so on. I acknowledge that this isn't the case and don't intend to pander to such nonsense. I'm fairly well versed in cinema and I hold my opinion in higher esteem than a casual movie go-er that doesn't analyze various aspects of a movie like the choice of shots, elements of cinematography, the quality of the dialogue, the structure of the narrative, the presence of exposition and so on. Likewise, there are many people that are much better versed in the history of cinema than I who are able to spot things that I may miss like the presence of avant-garde techniques, the influence of certain movements (Italian neo-realism, french new wave, dogme 95 etc) in a given film and lots of other things that I'm not educated enough on cinema to properly decipher. And I hold the opinions of those people in higher esteem than my own. So there is a certain amount to be said about some films being (somewhat) objectively better than others. However, one thing that IS completely subjective is the level of enjoyment that can be garnered from any given film. I think it's reasonable to assume that anyone that would rate a film 7 out of 10 or above enjoyed the film and that anyone that enjoyed a film liked it to some extent. Pro claims that no one liked Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As of 03/03/2018, 547,859 people have given Transformers a rating out of 10 on IMDB. Of those, 395,199 people have given it a rating of 7 or above[8]. That amounts to over 72% of the people that saw the movie and took it upon themselves to rate it on IMDB that enjoyed, and thus liked, the movie. As of 03/03/2018, 184,409 people have given Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a rating out of 10 on IMDB. Of those, 77, 449 people gave it a rating of 7 or above[9]. That amounts to almost 42% of the people that saw the movie and took it upon themselves to rate it on IMDB that enjoyed, and thus liked, the movie. So Pro's claim that no one enjoyed these movies is demonstrably false. To ban Michael Bay movies would be to deprive a lot of people enjoyment simply on a matter of personal taste (however superior that taste may be). This is patently absurd and a tad fascist. I would suggest that instead of wanting to ban Michael Bay movies, they should instead opt to do what I do: refrain from watching any Michael Bay movie that they can be pretty sure that they won't enjoy and refrain from watching any sequels to Michael Bay movies that they didn't enjoy. Or, they could take it a step further than I would and enact a personal boycott of Michael Bay movies altogether. I wouldn't recommend this though because Michael Bay can actually make a decent film from time to time (shout-out to The Rock). [1] https://law.justia.com... [2] http://www.eclectica.org... [3]https://openjurist.org... [4] http://articles.latimes.com... [5] https://pro.imdb.com... [6] https://pro.imdb.com... [7] https://pro.imdb.com... [8] http://www.imdb.com... [9] http://www.imdb.com...