Up until Avatar came along and spoilt his party, Michael Bay was sitting top of the 2009 box office charts with Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen. In spite of garnering reviews that you wouldn't go out of your way to call pleasant, Bay's Transformers sequel smashed the box office numbers of the first film, and - after a bit of toing and froing - led to the announcement of the third film, which is arriving in cinemas in 2011.

With filming due to start this year, and with Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox both firmly back on board, Bay has been dropping a hint or two to the Los Angeles Times about the direction that the third film is going to take. Truthfully, we had to blink and reread his comment, too:

"There will be a nice crescendo ending, It gets much more into the robot character. The last time you kind of met a few of the robots; this time you're gonna get a much cooler landscape."

It gets much more into the robot character? Er, okay. Appreciating that Bay takes a lot of shit for being the guy who just shovels in more effects and explosions and stuff, that's still his area of expertise. I've watched every Michael Bay movie (and enjoyed many of them, too), and can comfortably say that getting under the skin of human characters is alien to his movies. Getting into robot characters? This is going to be fascinating.

Transformers 3 is released on July 1st 2011. You can read the LA Times piece here.