Mark Wahlberg Makes Transformers Debut In Explosive Super Bowl Trailer

Mark Wahlberg brings “added value” to the upcoming fourth movie in the Transformers giant robot action movie franchise, according to a Forbes Magazine analysis. The presence of “an honest-to-goodness movie star” in Mark Wahlberg, writes the magazine’s motion picture industry columnist Scott Mendelson, “is a canny choice, a safeguard if you will, to lessen any domestic depreciation of interest in the franchise.”

The first trailer for Transformers: Age of Extinction, starring Mark Wahlberg and a cast of enormous, computer-animated robots, debuted during Sunday’s broadcast of the Super Bowl. Paramount Pictures, the studio behind the Transformers franchise, then posted the trailer on YouTube where by Monday at midnight Eastern time it had accrued more than 3 million views.

View the trailer for yourself below.

The first three entries in the Transformers series, each directed by Michael Bay as is Transformers: Age of Extinction, starred Shia La Beouf. But Mark Wahlberg, with such box office successes as the current Lone Survivor and the 2012 lowbrow comedy Ted, is a more bankable star.

According to the industry-tracking site Box Office Mojo, the first two Transformers films notched impressive worldwide grosses of $709,709,780 and $836,303,693 respectively, on budgets of $150 million and $200 million.

But while the third Transformers film actually cost slightly less to make than its immediate predecessor — $195 million — Transformers: Dark of the Moon grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide, $1,123,794,079 to be exact.

The third installment’s United States gross was down from its predecessor, however: $352,390,543 compared to $402,111,870, indicating the “domestic depreciation” that the introduction of Mark Wahlberg into the franchise is designed to help reverse.

The new movie also features Dinobots — robots that look like dinosaurs, which also turn up in the trailer.

Shia La Beouf recently announced that was “retiring from all public life” in the wake of plagiarism accusations over a short film he directed, an announcement it is safe to say no one took seriously. In 2005 Mark Wahlberg said he would retire from acting when he turned 40, his role in the upcoming Transformers flick shows that he is still going strong.

Last year director Michael Bay said that he replaced La Beouf with Mark Wahlberg simply because he did not want to make a fourth Transformers film with the same tone and direction as the first three.

“The only way to make it work out was to reinvent the whole thing,” Bay said. He added that the film will still appeal to the youthful viewers who make up its core audience because the 42-year-old Mark Wahlberg plays a “young dad with a 17-year-old daughter.”