To be fair, this is the fifth movie in the franchise in ten years. Some sort of drop-off was inevitable.

It's far from alone: this year, War for the Planet of the Apes has so far brought in just over half of what Dawn of the Planet of the Apes brought in, and both The Fate of the Furious and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales have had ~$250m drops from the previous instalments in their respective series.

What bugs me about the talk about the box office returns is that people (reporters, bloggers, forum users, commenters) are somewhat gleefully talking about 'the death of the Transformers movie franchise', as if this result is somehow bad or a failure (and yes, I know that AoE brought in $1.1b). Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but are people calling War for the Planet of the Apes a commercial failure or crowing about Pirates 5's box office receipts being some kind of 'death knell'?

This sort of thing leaves me with a suspicion that there's some kind of anti-Transformers bias where anything that makes the franchise look bad must be 'good'.