Boy Movies #88

There’s something weird happening on Michael Bay’s Instagram

Welcome to Boy Movies, the first newsletter to be written by someone with two sprained ankles.

Back in April, I received an intriguing request from longtime friend of the newsletter, Kerry:

Random but I need the boy movies literature review of what’s going on on Michael Bay’s instagram

Michael Bay’s Instagram has long been a source of captivation and confusion for me. He’s a prolific poster, one I would put on the level of Adrien Brody, Spike Lee, and Henry Winkler. All of those people are of course in very different leagues, and Michael Bay in particular is firmly in his own arena. His two-part series from December 2022 documenting FedEx’s devastating, though presumably accidental, destruction of Tom Cruise’s annual holiday gift to the Hollywood elite — the legendary coconut cake, which I would give both of my sprained ankles to try, yes I know anyone can purchase one, I will never do that, I want to be sent one by Tom Cruise or nothing at all, do not patronize me — is simply one of the all-time greatest uses of the form. It’s Boy Movies canon, much like every movie Michael Bay has ever made.

“Strange image”

Back when I still used Instagram, I of course counted myself as one of Michael Bay’s hundreds of thousands of followers. I was always excited to see a new post from him, often more excited than I was to see posts from my real life friends — I knew he would never post a picture of his ugly boyfriend with a “this guy <3” caption, after all. His posts were concise and direct, aside from the moments where he acted as his own publicist. His greatest passions were America and his own movies. I enjoyed the simplicity and straightforwardness. I enjoyed his casual confidence. It made complete sense that Michael Bay was that type of poster.

I deleted Instagram last year (the app, not my account, which I keep active for moments like these where I must conduct research) and subsequently fell off my diligent monitoring of his internet presence. Michael Bay was not going to be the person that kept me on Instagram, and his months-long hiatus from the app made him unreliable, anyway. Maybe someday I’ll write an issue about his two collaborations with Ben Affleck (the phenomenal Armageddon and the phenomenally homosexual Pearl Harbor), but today is not that day. Today I’m here to talk about what’s going on on Michael Bay’s Instagram.

Did you know Michael Bay recently directed a parkour documentary? Did you know Michael Bay directed a(n HBO) Max documentary series about, in his words, “a serial killing family”? Did you know that Michael Bay never stopped calling it HBO Max¹? Did you know that the comments section under every single Instagram post Michael Bay makes are filled with people begging him to direct another Transformers movie? He never responds.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to when things started getting weird: Michael Bay’s last Instagram post before his unannounced break was on November 7, 2023. In this post, he wrote a brief but impassioned message condemning AI, alongside an inexplicable photo of a video of himself giving some sort of talk — I assume — about — again, I assume, I have only context clues to go off of — why AI is bad. “Speaking about A.I. - it doesn’t CREATE it just IMITATES,” Michael Bay wrote. “And will create a whole bunch of lazy people. So to all the Original Creators out there, have No Fear!” Alright, man, sounds good! Hard to argue with you there, brother! That was all he had to say for a while, until April 29, 2024, when he returned to his favorite app with a video of the comedian Beetlejuice on Howard Stern, talking about the time he turned down Michael Bay’s offer to voice one of the Transformers. “I’m finally back on Instagram!!” Michael Bay wrote, with no further commentary. Things were never the same after that.

The thing about Michael Bay’s Instagram is that there’s nothing obviously off about his recent posts. Gone are the days of squinting selfies accompanied by uncomplicated captions. In 2025, Michael Bay almost exclusively posts strangely edited videos, typically featuring some sort of front-facing component. His penchant for addressing his followers this way is well-documented, but there at least used to be some variety on his feed. But it’s not a Kanye situation, where we’re all watching a severely mentally ill person post through it. Michael Bay is clearly not crashing out: These are the posts of a lucid individual. It’s not even that Michael Bay has casually gone full MAGA — he’s been an open Trump supporter since the beginning, but also Michael Bay having conservative views should not shock anyone who has ever seen a Michael Bay movie — or even that he made a couple of videos about his experience at a “raw vegan retreat.” I think the real shock to me is that he’s gotten… how do I say this… tacky? Bro is tacky.

“A good day to smile!”

To call this a rebrand would be disingenuous. It’s not that it’s out of character for Michael Bay to behave tackily. Michael Bay’s filmography is defined by tackiness; having a big budget doesn’t make his films any less so. Money, quite famously, can’t buy you class. As Matt Zoller Seitz once wrote of the particular Michael Bay aesthetic, “He packs each frame with baroque detail and floods the screen with light and smog; he prefers extreme wide angles or punishingly tight telephoto close-ups, which make each shot dense enough to burst.” The same can be said of his Instagram videos.

Take the self-described “funny short” he posted in February, which chronicles his “Vatican break-in” and ensuing “arrest” by the Polizia di Stato. This non-story got written up by some of the most random websites in existence, which meant that Michael Bay had to get back on Instagram and tell the criminally stupid population of the world that, no, he didn’t actually stage a Vatican break-in, nor was he taken into custody by the Italian police. “Had bit of free time to make a funny short,” he clarified. “Apparently 5 million people thought it was real.” I don’t fully understand what the joke is here, or if there really is a joke, but the narrative is, nonetheless, pure Michael Bay: expensive and ornate visuals, a protagonist whose brain and body are pulsing with so much testosterone that it renders him blind to anything happening around him, the cops triumphing in the end.

Just days after this, Michael Bay began documenting his experience shooting a state-sanctioned Secret Service recruitment commercial that apparently aired during the Super Bowl. (Can anyone who watched the Super Bowl confirm or deny this for me? I was busy rewatching Another Round with Akosua.) “President Trump wanted to meet me,” he wrote under one of the three behind-the-scenes videos he posted. “I’m the only person standing in front of AF1, Marine One lands, and the President walks up to me: surreal.” Surreal indeed.

Jingoism is a defining feature of Michael Bay’s entire oeuvre. If the Trump-run US government was going to entrust anyone with the task of hyping up the Secret Service, it makes sense that it would be the guy who directed 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, a John Krasinski-starring film that Trump enjoyed enough to host screenings of during his 2016 campaign. The commercial features, among other baffling details, an actor recreating the moment where a Secret Service agent informed George Bush that a second plane had hit the towers. It’s ugly and earnest and patriotic. It is tailor-made for idiots. Even without knowing a thing about Michael Bay, I’m sure if I told you that this ad was made by a man who is so rarely seen without his MIAMI POLICE hat that he refused to take off even at the aforementioned raw vegan retreat, you’d be like, “Yeah, that checks out.” This commercial, like America, is tacky. This commercial, like Michael Bay, is tacky. In that sense, this commercial is a culmination of his entire career.

Michael Bay began promoting his parkour documentary not long after the smashing success of his Secret Service ad, which reminded me that he hasn’t made a feature film since 2022’s Ambulance, which was the last movie I saw in a theater before getting COVID for the first time. (Did Michael Bay’s Ambulance give me COVID? That’s not for me to say, though it could be something to consider.) This of course hasn’t stopped him from engaging in public displays of Bayhem (his word, which I genuinely think is good): He’s still exploding stuff — he’s just doing it for Instagram. He’s still pulling off stunts — he’s just filming them in 9:16. If anything, Michael Bay is demonstrating a willingness to adapt to the times, certainly more than other filmmakers who are still clinging desperately to the bloated corpse of the movie industry, hoping against hope that it will somehow repair itself.

I don’t believe that Michael Bay is trying to communicate any deeper meaning with these posts, nor do I believe that his embracing of MAGAism means people in Hollywood won’t work with him. People in Hollywood don’t have principles, and criticizing Trump has become unpopular, anyway. I don’t even think Michael Bay’s switch to making Instagram-specific content is an indicator of any greater cancer within the entertainment industry, which would be there with or without him. I do think Michael Bay is just doing what he’s always done, which is literally whatever he wants. Michael Bay hasn’t adapted to the times, the times have adapted to Michael Bay. He’s always had these sensibilities, it’s just that his sensibilities have become popular again.

Michael Bay loves reminiscing about his directorial debut, 1995’s Bad Boys, starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as a pair of Miami-based buddy cops. Michael Bay reported live from the premiere of last year’s fourquel, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, curiously alone as he spoke directly into the camera about the wistfulness brought on by watching the franchise he created go on without him. (“It’s always bittersweet,” Michael Bay said.) To the surprise of those who thought Will Smith’s career was over post-Slap (again: people are criminally stupid), Bad Boys: Ride or Die was a massive box office success, all but guaranteeing that Smith and Lawrence will continue making these movies until they drop dead. Bad Boys was cool in the ‘90s, and it’s cool again now, and I predict it will enjoy a long period of coolness for many years to come. Michael Bay is only tangentially involved with the franchise at this point, but his influence over them is undeniable. Like I said, the only thing Michael Bay did was wait out the rest of the world.

• I interviewed Edi Patterson about The Righteous Gemstones finale <3 a dream <3

• I reviewed Duster, the new J.J. Abrams-Josh Holloway collab. This one’s for the Sawyer girls <3

1. Always ahead of the curve.