Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the producer whose best-reviewed Transformers flopped

Lorenzo di Bonaventura

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 13, 1957 New York City, New York, USA
Occupation	Film producer
Known for	Side by Side, The Matrix Revisited, The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened?

For most of his career, Lorenzo di Bonaventura has lived on the wrong side of the reviews and the right side of the receipts. The Transformers films he produced with Michael Bay were mocked for years and handed a Worst Picture Razzie, and they kept selling tickets by the hundreds of millions. Then the franchise finally made a film critics loved, an animated origin story called Transformers One, and audiences stayed home. That reversal is the puzzle on his desk at Paramount as he lines up a new G.I. Joe with Bradley Cooper and a live-action film of a best-selling video game.

He came to Hollywood from a family that measured success in concert halls. His father, Mario di Bonaventura, was a symphony conductor and his uncle, Anthony di Bonaventura, a concert pianist, and the boy grew up in New York City close to an art form that does not answer to opening weekends. He went through Choate Rosemary Hall and Harvard, where he played soccer, and later took an MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a training that shows in how plainly he still talks about studio economics.

His first real power came at Warner Bros., where he spent more than a decade as an executive and rose to president of worldwide production. On his watch the studio shepherded The Matrix into production and bought the film rights to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, two decisions that shaped Warner’s next twenty years more than any single film he has produced since. Warner extended his contract in 2001, and in September 2002 he stepped away from the corporate job to become an independent producer, trading the authority to greenlight for the freedom to develop his own material.

The first films under his own banner came out of that Warner arrangement: Constantine, with Keanu Reeves as a chain-smoking exorcist under director Francis Lawrence, and John Singleton’s revenge thriller Four Brothers. Di Bonaventura Pictures later settled at Paramount, where it is still based, and there the producer found the material that would define him: a line of Hasbro toys.

Transformers, directed by Bay with Steven Spielberg as executive producer, earned more than $700 million worldwide in 2007. Four Bay sequels followed, among them Transformers: Age of Extinction, which passed $1.1 billion, and the live-action series has now grossed well over $5 billion. In parallel he built a second Hasbro franchise from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and its follow-ups, and kept a steady line of adult genre films running beside the robots: Salt with Angelina Jolie, the retired-spy caper RED with Bruce Willis, Peter Berg’s oil-rig disaster drama Deepwater Horizon and Steven Soderbergh‘s Side Effects. He also knows a blunt commercial hook when he sees one. The Meg, which sets Jason Statham against a prehistoric shark, made more than $530 million and earned a sequel.

The critical record is harder to defend, and he has not always tried. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen took more than $830 million and won Worst Picture at the Razzies. Di Bonaventura later told Empire that the 2007–2008 Writers Guild strike had left the film without a script it could develop. “That really screwed us up,” he said, adding that Paramount “didn’t have a lot of other assets at that time, so the decision was to plough forward.” The answer is candid, and it is also revealing: the sequel went ahead because the studio needed it, whatever state the pages were in. The same producer appeared in the documentary Side by Side warning that cheap digital cameras would bury audiences in bad films and leave nobody to separate them from good ones. Critics who sat through five Bay films might reply that the problem of taste started closer to home. Sony’s Madame Web, which he produced, was another public miss, taking about $100 million worldwide against an $80 million budget.

The twist came with Transformers One. Directed by Josh Cooley, the animated prequel about the young Optimus Prime and Megatron drew the warmest reviews the franchise has ever had, then opened below expectations and finished at around $129 million worldwide on a $75 million budget. Before release, di Bonaventura had been plain that any sequel depended on turnout. The film he could finally defend to critics is the one the box office did not reward, and that inverts the bargain his career was built on.

That record frames what Paramount announced this month. On October 2, Variety reported that Bradley Cooper will play Duke in a new G.I. Joe directed by Danny McBride, who wrote the script with Jeff Fradley and John Carcieri. Di Bonaventura is producing with his long-time partner Mark Vahradian and with Zev Foreman for Hasbro Entertainment, and the studio says the film has been uncoupled from the Transformers crossover teased at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Six days later, Deadline reported that Paramount is developing a live-action Cyberpunk 2077 with di Bonaventura attached alongside CD Projekt Red, the Polish studio behind a game that has sold more than 40 million copies. No director, cast or release date has been announced.

Television has become a second front. He was an executive producer on the Shooter series and on Apple TV+‘s The New Look, Todd A. Kessler’s drama about Christian Dior and Coco Chanel in and after occupied Paris. Away from the sets di Bonaventura, a New Yorker born on January 13, 1957, chairs the Creative Council of RepresentUs, a nonpartisan anti-corruption organisation, and has sat on the board of trustees of Claremont Graduate University since 2015. He has long lived in Los Angeles with his wife and children and keeps the family out of his press rounds.

A sequel to Constantine, with Reeves and Lawrence both publicly keen, remains in development with no start date. The next film he actually gets in front of cameras will be G.I. Joe, a reboot that leans on a movie star instead of a crossover, and it should answer the question Transformers One left behind: whether audiences still want the di Bonaventura blockbuster critics resisted, or will turn up for the kind they liked.

Tags: Hollywood, Bradley Cooper, Michael Bay, film producers, Transformers, Lorenzo di Bonaventura

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