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Published Oct 31, 2026, 12:31 PM EDT
Adam Blevins began working in the entertainment industry in 2022 as a Staff Writer for Agents of Fandom, where he progressed to Senior Editor and interviewed talent from Marvel Studios, House of the Dragon, and Planet of the Apes. He joined Collider as a News Author in April 2024, was promoted to a Senior position in December 2024, and has written over 3,000 articles for the site, including exclusives relating to Avengers: Doomsday, The Penguin, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, and more. He primarily writes about the latest box office numbers and the hottest movies and TV shows on streaming, while also covering superhero and sci-fi news. He has completed a set visit for The Chosen and even has several months of experience writing Gaming Features at ScreenRant. You can find him on X, LinkedIn, and Muckrack.
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Michael Bay is widely known and loved by fans for his explosive style of directing when it comes to some of the biggest franchises ever, like Transformers, but he’s also found success with one of his forgotten TV shows this year. Between 2014 and 2018, Bay produced the Eric Dane-led sci-fi series, The Last Ship, which aired on TNT for five seasons. The show was added to Netflix earlier this year, where it found redemption as one of the most-watched titles on the platform, and though it’s settled down now, it encouraged people to check out some of Bay’s other projects. Bay was originally set to reunite with Will Smith for a new Netflix action movie, Fast and Loose, but he left the project after creative differences arose between him and Smith.
It’s been a quiet few years for Bay, who has been hard at work on the Skibidi Toilet adaptation — yes, that’s a real thing — but he’s reportedly returning to the Transformers franchise for a new movie. The last time Bay stepped behind the camera to direct a feature film came back in 2022 when he teamed up with Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II for Ambulance, the high-octane thriller that grossed over $52 million at the box office. This would have been more impressive were it not carrying a $40 million budget, leaving it with an estimated break-even point of over $75 million. For the last few months, Ambulance has been streaming exclusively on Netflix, but the streamer recently pulled the film from its library at the start of November. However, it’s still available to rent or purchase on VOD platforms like Prime Video and Apple TV.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
FIND YOUR FRANCHISE →
01
How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said. BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we're already laughing about something. CI'm the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived. DBy accident. I wasn't supposed to be here, and now I'm the only one who can do anything about it.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started. BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I'm not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup. CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving. DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don't go down.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone. BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I'd trade the whole mission for any one of them. CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I'd still take the worst part of the job myself. DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don't know I exist.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of.
AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction. BThe people counting on me. I don't appear to have a limit when it's family on the line. CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it's going to be me. DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it. BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion. CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff. DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me. BI don't take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out. CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second. DThey're in a van outside telling me what I'm doing wrong while I'm the one bleeding on broken glass.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
ASomething was taken from me that can't be replaced, and I've been settling that account ever since. BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I'll defend it with everything. CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don't know how to hand that to anyone else. DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to. BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table. CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me. DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill.
REVEAL MY FRANCHISE →
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.
- The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him.
- You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it.
- Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise.
- People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work.
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.
- This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to.
- You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason.
- You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
- The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
- This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left.
- You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
- Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
- Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
- You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
- You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
What Is ‘Ambulance’ About?
In addition to Gyllenhaal and Abdul-Mateen II, Ambulance also stars Eiza González, who can be seen in Guy Ritchie’s 2026 blockbuster, In The Grey. Garett Dillahunt, who had a key role in the critically acclaimed HBO series, Lanterns, also stars in Ambulance. The official synopsis for Ambulance, which earned scores of 68% from critics and 87% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, reads as follows:
“Over one day across the streets of L.A., three lives will change forever. In this breakneck thriller from director-producer Michael Bay, decorated veteran Will Sharp, desperate for money to cover his wife's medical bills, asks for help from the one person he knows he shouldn't — his adoptive brother Danny. A charismatic career criminal, Danny instead offers him a score: the biggest bank heist in Los Angeles history: $32 million. With his wife's survival on the line, Will can't say no. But when their getaway goes spectacularly wrong, the desperate brothers hijack an ambulance with a wounded cop clinging to life and ace EMT Cam Thompson onboard. In a high-speed pursuit that never stops, Will and Danny must evade a massive, city-wide law enforcement response, keep their hostages alive, and somehow try not to kill each other, all while executing the most insane escape L.A. has ever seen.”
Check out Ambulance on VOD platforms like Prime Video now that it’s been removed from Netflix, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of Michael Bay’s future projects.
Release Date April 8, 2022
Runtime 136 minutes
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Jake Gyllenhaal
Danny Sharp
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