Amidst all the news about Weinstein, Roy Price, David O Russell and various other men in Hollywood abusing and sexually harassing women and ruining their careers, I’ve been wondering about director Michael Bay. He has done and said some awful things about his female leads and given what we’ve heard about his casting process I would expect that he’s even worse behind the scenes. So in this climate where women are telling their stories and we’re re-examining the entire industry, who better than to produce a live action movie based on a beloved children’s cartoon character than Bay, right? This is exactly the right moment to announce this exciting and completely well thought out project:
Michael Bay, best known for making movies where giant robots save the Earth, albeit with a frankly unacceptable amount of collateral damage and uncontrolled explosions, is turning his attention to an adaptation of a children’s animation.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bay will produce a big screen version of popular Nickelodeon children’s series Dora the Explorer under his Platinum Dunes banner.
It will be live-action and apparently see Dora as a teenager instead of a 7-year-old, as she is in the animated series, the film centering on her moving to the city to live with her cousin Diego.
Michael Bay gets custom camera, only uses it for explosions and boobs
Unless Bay decides to direct the thing, however, it’s unlikely that Dora will come equipped with a jetpack and proton blaster, as the script is currently being worked on by The Muppets scribe Nick Stoller.
The project has been kicking around for some time but is finally expected to be released in 2019.
I did like The Muppets Movie by Nick Stoller, who is writing this one, but this is peak Hollywood right here. In an industry where women and girls are vastly underrepresented, they’re hiring a producer known for objectifying and harassing women to produce a story about a beloved girl character. Instead of portraying Dora as we know and love her, as an ingenious and resourceful bilingual middle schooler with a giant head and a bowl haircut, they’re making her a teenager in a live action movie. I’m sure the dudes who came up with this genius idea will have all sorts of excuses and assurances for why it’s ok and why we should just wait and see how it turns out. The people involved at this stage are a harbinger of how this movie is going to be. Make this an animated movie by Pixar, Disney or that studio that makes the characters with the giant heads – Dreamworks. Dora is not a live action character, she’s not a teen, and she needs her story told by women, preferably Hispanic women. Maybe they’ll hire a woman to direct and Bay will have limited involvement, but I doubt it. If he directs, Dora will be played by Megan Fox in a crop top and tight cargo shorts while Diego, played by Chris Pratt, will have to swoop in and save the day. Grab your booty shorts, let’s go! Grabber no grabbing!
Check out Michael Bay’s DORA THE EXPLORER Poster! pic.twitter.com/anoZ9Y5bpV
— Danika🦇 (@DanikaCola) October 23, 2017
We live in a world where a Dora the Explorer movie with Michael Bay as its producer is going to be a thing.
This is the darkest timeline.
— Phantom Thief Mavvy (@BlackMageMavvy) October 23, 2017
This was an actual Collegehumor sketch for crying out loud!https://t.co/InRZfKvmnp
— Scarin' O'Reilly (@CaelynOReilly) October 23, 2017
Dora The Explorer (2019)
Producer: Michael Bay pic.twitter.com/9YJzdm5wEE
— Keith Ó Gealbháin (@KeithGalvin) October 23, 2017
photos credit: Nick Jr and WENN
Here’s hoping he doesn’t have her in a crop top leaning seductively over the map.
BAAAAHAHAHAHA!
Why is 2017 making no sense?
Of course he will. It’ll probably be the poster.
Poor Dora.
Ha! I’m just glad Diego is still her cousin so we can hopefully avoid any desperately awkward teen romance scenes with juvenile takes on sexuality…hopefully? 😒
A movie needing two Hispanic leads? Sigh..don’t screw this up Bay…err anyone involved who isn’t Michael Bay. No Dora cannot be played by Millie Bobbie Brown and no Diego cannot be played by Tom Holland. No.
Perhaps they can find out she’s his cousin after they begin flirting. It would be hilarious, like Luke and Leia. Then, explosions.
He will. and when she doesn’t want to be sexualized she will be fired and replaced.
It will have bad explosions, a sexy Dora, Diego saving the day and more EXPLOSIONS
Dora Explores Dallas might be an apt title.
Lol
Hollywood has gone mad. Nuff said
No.
Right? He’s so effing gross it’s not funny *at all*. He has no business directing a children’s movie. Ever since this Harvey Weinstein crap came to light I’ve just been waiting for people to turn on Michael Bay. He’s so nasty.
twill be like Tomb Raider with a Bowl Cut… urgh.
Lolol!
what next?
Bryan Singer directs Go Diego Go?
*sad chortle*
More like Run Away, Diego, Run.
Dora in cutoffs and white tshirts running through the rain as things explode around her … geezus Hollywood
And is eventually saved by Diego because lol women are silly b!tches who can’t do anything. /s
I just want to know why Bay would even do this — he has professed his love for teenage boy properties and this seems like it would bore and repulse him.
Dora the Exploder, 2017 the year of so much crazy and then add a bucket of nonsense as a topping.
Ahaha oh dear me. This is the stupidest idea i’ve heard since that idiotic confederacy idea done by white bros.
My guess, 30 minutes in Dora get a motorcycle. A very dirty motorcycle that needs to be sponge bathed. If Dora is also cast by Bay, expect some generic hot VS model that wears a wig and pretends she’s a teen, and expect it to be Kendall Jenner quality.
No, no. Michael Bay will let the current climate (nervous studios) affect him, and he will tone it way down. It will have (latina) Selena Gomez, her clothes will only be a bit too short and tight, and three smallish explosions tops.
Don’t forget, he’ll cast her by having her wash his car in a bikini.
So…basically teenage Tomb Raider with bigger explosions?
If by explosions you mean boobs, yes”
Reads like a parody.
Was that Ariel Winter as Dora in that College Humor Sketch above? It was pretty funny.
Coincidentally, Ariel actually does voice work. Not for Dora (she’s been a succession of young bilingual voice actors), but I think Ariel has done a Disney animated show aimed at very young kids that requires a lot of singing (Princess something the First, can’t remember the name and net is too wonky to check). She’s voiced the title character quite well, as I recall.
Sofia the First (I have a preschool-aged daughter, lol, I know ’em all!) Ariel Winter does a very good job on that show.
Is Dora *really* even a “thing” anymore (like say, “Elena” is)? Are we due a short-lived revival like The Muppets?
Meanwhile, film makers continue to blame Rotten Tomatoes and the audience’s “ignorance” on the industry’s steady decline.
It’s time for a change of the guards/gatekeepers…
That College Humor video is hilarious!
Someone protect that teenage girl
Somewhere Elmo is doing Grey Goose shots and staring into middle distance.
😃😃😃
THIS IS SO WRONG
Can’t wait for the slo-mo running at sunset in front of an American flag scene, with Dora’s bosoms heaving, in a totally PG-13 manner, of course.
If Michael Bay is a harasser, he shouldn’t be directing any movie at all – or running anything else for that matter.
But I don’t think this dumbness is gender-connected. They made live-action movies of Scooby-Doo and the Flintstones, too. And those were also idiotic. But Hollywood is addicted to gimmickry.
Yeah, but the Scooby-Do gang really were always teenagers. Perpetual teenagers, of course, fluctuating between high school and college and a little beyond into their early twenties depending on the incarnation. The live action ones eventually grew on me, some were better than others (just like the animated versions). The TV movie animated ones were really good even just for the music, especially the intros. The pirate one especially.
Why would they think Dora would have the same appeal in live action as a teenager? Her fan base expects to see a very young elementary school kid (not even up to middle school; that would be cousin Diego). And what about Boots? Not sure I want to see the monkey as an adolescent ….
Hollywood has officially lost it. This is some dumb crap! Dora will be changed into some big breasted barely legal teen, backpack will be turned into her sexy Latin on again off again boyfriend and the monkey will talk. Pure garbage. 😑
My stomach actually turned as I read this. The only way Bay knows how to show female characters is as trite pieces of bouncing breasts and bent-over any flat surface eye-candy. I’m disgusted with anyone involved in the decision to allow him to produce a Dora live-action movie, especially when she’s going to be a teenager.
“Dora will be played by Megan Fox in a crop top and tight cargo shorts while Diego, played by Chris Pratt, will have to swoop in and save the day. Grab your booty shorts, let’s go! Grabber no grabbing!”
I literally haven’t stopped laughing about these three sentences. Celebitchy, you are f-cking hilarious.
Will Dora have to wash his car in a bikini as her audition?
Those posters made my day. They made me cry with laughter….my office mate now officially thinks I’m crazy.
Isn’t he another one who treats women like crap?
There actually already is a teenage dora cartoon by nickelodeon. My kids love it and it makes me want to scream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SB613u5Ias
Yes! It should be noted that he isn’t creating a teen Dora- there is one and my kids love it, too!
Exactly! Came here to write this too.
I am so officially out of touch… Will have to check that teen Dora one out if I can find it, to see how they do it. But animation is so much more flexible than live action even with computers for special effects today.
Hang on now, I wrote this exact joke in 2014.
This headline is a rollercoaster. It’s like the climb up the hill with the excitement of “darker skinned Latina woman gets her own movie!” only to come over the top to find Michael Bay has directed this ride and set up an explosive rig at the bottom of the plunge, and your anticipation rapidly becomes horror and an understanding that you may not survive this.
Stoller involved does not bother me ( I loved The Muppets Movie ), Bay being involved does. Shame on the studio for this.
Jeeez when I saw the headline I thought: “speaking of perv”….
please contact VIACOM and Nickelodeon and say NO.
smh.
dora should remain her age and not be directed by a sexist pig.
why can’t she kick ass be a girl and be a kid and be exactly as her character was created?!?!?!
please contact!
No, No, NO! Somebody in Hollywood, please stop this.
You all have to stop. My spawn is napping and I am laughing like a donkey. Think of the children.
Nope.
I know everybody’s scratching their head over this but it seems pretty canny to me.
While everyone’s going “who asked for this?/this is a joke, right?” Bay attempts a preemptive strike to attach himself to a kid-oriented feature that everyone is “wtf, no” about but *should* he could manage pull it off the right way, i.e. with more intelligence than explosions, and actual emotional insight, might surprise everyone enough to 180-degree-shift his image away from “highly likely sexual harasser and possibly worse” to “guy who has rebooted the family feature without objectifying anyone while using markedly less violence, now we all have amnesia about his sketchier stuff”.
Seeing as guys like him can get away with doing the least and still get praised for it, all he’d have to do is tick a few boxes while looking vaguely woke, and managing to cast people who’ll help the audience forget he directed it; or win the audience’s affection *despite* him directing it.
All that I’m getting out of this is that somebody’s so politely concerned with being pulled into the current HW predator takedown that they’re already invading genres and franchises they have no real reason to be involved in.
Seems like a hyper-defensive move if there’s nothing behind it. Or, perhaps, maybe he was just a lowkey Dora fan all along?
Good angle. Sadly I think you’re right.
Is it April fool’s? What the heck? Umm NO. He’s going to sexualize poor Dora.