Summary
Alexey Gerasimov first started talking with Michael Bay shortly after he started talking with Invisible Narratives about assigning them his IP, around July 2023. The Skibidi Toilet movie directed by Michael Bay was announced in mid-2024. On May 21, 2025, it was announced to start production. However, shortly after this news was announced, Michael Bay posted on Instagram saying he was not directing a Skibidi Toilet movie.
This confused many fans, since major news sites reported that Michael Bay was directing a movie. Inviz did not come out to correct the confusion. About 2 weeks later on June 6, Alexey posted that he felt like the movie was not being made. He said he was isolated from the process and had not been receiving updates.
On the same day, Alexey deleted that message and posted another message appearing to clear things up, saying things were moving behind the scenes that he didn’t have visibility into, and that he was actually excited for what was coming. Fans now believe Invisible may have asked him to remove that message. Michael Bay also posted saying he has been working on a “short” Skibidi project, rather than a full movie. Read the full story below:
Michael Bay
Michael Bay is one of the most commercially successful film directors in cinema history. He had built his reputation over three decades on films like The Rock (1996), Armageddon (1998), Bad Boys (1995) and its sequels, and most consequentially, the Transformers franchise which he helmed through five films beginning in 2007 and which collectively earned billions at the global box office. Source: ScreenRant
The movies Michael Bay directed in his time.
Adam Goodman
Michael’s professional relationship with Adam Goodman predated the Skibidi Toilet partnership by many years. Goodman, as president of Paramount Pictures, had been one of the key institutional forces behind the original Transformers film and its sequels.
Bay and Goodman had built and scaled one of the most successful franchise ecosystems in Hollywood history together, and when Goodman launched Invisible Narratives around 2018, Bay stayed close with the company in the capacity of Chief Creative Advisor, though it remained unconfirmed whether they were working together on formal business terms regarding Invisible Narratives. The role was designed to bridge Goodman’s institutional expertise with Michael’s credibility as a filmmaker.
Pictures of Adam Goodman and Michael Bay, showing that they have worked with eachother in the past.
When Goodman first encountered Skibidi Toilet in 2023, he described to Aftermath what drew him in, Gerasimov was essentially making pre-visualizations of Transformers fights, and the quality of the action sequences bore comparison to work produced by professional artists on high-budget productions. For Michael, the series presented a different kind of appeal. Here was a property whose entire aesthetic DNA was relentless action, explosions, and escalating chaos, with little dialogue, mapped onto the grammar of his own filmmaking more naturally than almost any other IP he could have been presented with.
The relationship between Michael and Alexey developed gradually through the Invisible Narratives framework, with Goodman serving as the initial bridge. According to Goodman’s own statements to The Washington Post, Michael and Alexey were brought together through a process of mutual creative exposure.
Alexey was effusive about Michael, he loved him and the prospect of collaborating with the director he admired was one of the driving forces behind his excitement for everything that followed.
Goodman also told The Washington Post that Michael and Alexey were spending significant time together, that Bay and Alexey spent “a lot of time together talking about process, collaboration, iteration, etc.” Alexey was being inducted into the language of Hollywood production through direct collaboration with the people who had built some of its biggest powerhouses.
The Movie
On July 24 2024, Variety broke the story that would send the internet into immediate frenzy. Michael Bay and Adam Goodman were in active development on a Skibidi Toilet film and television franchise. The announcement came through an interview on Variety’s Strictly Business podcast, in which Goodman confirmed that talks were underway on both the television and film fronts.
Goodman was ambitious in his characterization of the opportunity. The project had, he said, the potential to become “the next Transformers or a Marvel universe.” The planned adaptation was described as a live-action and animation hybrid, stylistically positioned near the aesthetic of films like John Wick and District 9, grounded enough in real-world physical stakes to feel visceral but expansive enough to accommodate the surreal identity and scale of Skibidi Toilet. Michael was described as working closely with Alexey and the creative team to develop the production’s visual foundations.
The announcement sent Twitter and Reddit into spirals of disbelief and mockery while the actual fanbase reacted with excitement. Alexey had been open about his adoration for Michael, and the idea of Skibidi Toilet being handled by the director who had defined a generation of blockbuster action filmmaking felt, to many fans, like a genuine coronation of the IP. Bay’s filmography, with its emphasis on escalating mechanical warfare and sensory overload, aligned so naturally with Skibidi Toilet’s aesthetic that some felt it was almost inevitable.
The film press covered the announcement with varying degrees of seriousness. The A.V. Club noted the difficulty of “translating what’s funny or interesting about an internet subculture into traditional formats. “Gizmodo asked what an “unfathomably expensive” version of the experience would even look like, one that somehow felt more premium than something anyone could already watch on YouTube for free.
For Alexey, the announcement represented the materialization of one of the central promises that had drawn him into the Invisible Narratives partnership in the first place. The movie had been a stated goal since the earliest conversations with Adam Goodman and Alexey was genuinely thrilled.
After the movie was announced in 2024, Alexey started the “tv franchise” channel on his discord. The channel was deleted after Alexey expressed disappointment in the way the movie was being handled. It appears to have been deleted around the same time he wrote those messages saying “I feel like movie is not being made” this will be explained later in this article.
Nearly a year passed between the July 2024 announcement and the next significant public development.
Movie starring production
Invisible Narratives issued a press release on May 21, 2025 confirming that production on the Skibidi Toilet movie had officially begun. The release was notable not just for confirming the project’s existence but for the caliber of the creative team it announced. Michael had assembled two major collaborators from his most acclaimed productions. Jeffrey Beecroft, the Academy Award-nominated production designer whose credits included Transformers, 12 Monkeys, and A Quiet Place; and Rob Legato, a three-time Academy Award-winning VFX supervisor whose work spanned Titanic, Avatar, Hugo, and The Jungle Book.
Bay himself had been, according to the press release, actively working on the project since the first public announcement. The release confirmed Invisible Narratives was producing and developing while financing the film independently, without a major studio distribution partner announced.
Bay amplified the announcement with a sequence of Instagram Reels that became a minor viral event in their own right. Four days before the press release, he had posted an AI-generated image of a ruined street engulfed in fire, together with the message, “Don’t worry, not going to use AI in my films but there is a clue here.”
Then, following the production announcement, he posted a second reel featuring his Bayhem production logo, followed by two figures looking up at the sky against a ravaged urban backdrop, with the words, “They are coming.” The implicit suggestion that the Skibidi Toilets/Astro Toilets were invading Earth in a large-scale alien invasion.
Skibidi Toilet fan creator Plunger posted a short analysing these teasers:
Within days of the production announcement, the narrative around the project began to shift in a direction that few had anticipated.
May 24, 2025
Michael Bay posted an Instagram Reel addressing the news about his involvement. He said he was not directing a Skibidi Toilet movie.
“You know how mom and dad have always told you, ‘Don’t believe everything you read on the internet,’” he opened. He then panned the camera to a table covered in scripts. “I went on the internet last night and it says stuff about me directing something. I know what I’m directing, but it’s not the thing they keep talking about. That’s a movie. These are a whole bunch of movies right now. One is in serious prep. One’s in soft prep. One I’m writing. Two I’m getting ready to produce. But there’s not one in that little pile that says ‘Skibidi.’ So let’s just stop the lore right now. OK. You heard it from me.”
The internet greeted the video with a mixture of disbelief and amusement. The timing was almost impossible to parse seriously. Bay had, just days earlier, posted what appeared to be Skibidi Toilet teasers complete with his Bayhem logo. Some outlets read the video as a clean denial. Others suspected a PR strategy and that Bay was deliberately stoking confusion to keep the project in the news cycle without making formal commitments.
What the reel clarified, was something more specific: Bay was not directing the film. He had never formally been announced as its director. The Invisible Narratives press release had described him as working on the project in his capacity as Chief Creative Adviser and producer, but coverage had quickly collapsed that distinction, and every headline was calling him the director. The reel appeared to be correcting that specific claim, rather than disavowing Skibidi Toilet altogether. He remained involved. He just wasn’t the one who was going to direct.
June 6–7, 2025
Alexey Gerasimov posted an announcement on his Discord server. The messages showed an Alexey who felt completely cut off. from the project that was supposed to be built around his life’s work.
“I’m very disappointed and upset recently, bros,” Alexey had written. “I feel like movie is not being made. At least I have not received any updates on it, have not seen any previews, were not involved in discussing any details. Just nothing.”
In a second message, he expanded on the situation. “There was also more recent idea to make sort of short project on their end, kind of collab, and this idea is in some sort of stage at least for a half a year now. It’s like no one is working, or at least no one is transparent about it. I’m completely isolated from process. No concepts, no updates. Something imprecise and blurry was described on the phone about it, I seen bits of script… and that’s it. I feel like a fool. My hope is dying with immense speed now.”
Alexey’s reference to the short project being in “some sort of stage at least for a half a year” suggested that the pivot away from the feature film toward whatever smaller collaboration Bay had been working on had happened well before any public announcement. From Boom’s perspective, neither project was actually moving. He was being kept at arm’s length from both.
The same day Alexey posted his disappointed messages, he sent another message to a user named Ibio75, asking for his video coverage on his messages to be taken off. The explanation he gave was that Invisible Narratives had reached out to him and told him there had been a misunderstanding on his part that Michael was simply a perfectionist who didn’t like sharing pre-production material, and that Bay was planning to post something that very day. “I think today Michael is going to post something,” Alexey wrote, “and I think we will get positively together.”
And then, as Alexey had said it would, Michael Bay posted on Instagram, and this time the message was clearer than the earlier denial. Rather than a full feature film, Bay described a short-form creative project like a collaboration between himself and Boom, something smaller in scale and format than the theatrical ambitions that had attached to the Invisible Narratives press release.
It was an acknowledgment that what was actually in development between them was not the next Transformers, not a Marvel universe, but something more experimental, more contained, still being defined. The framing of the post matched what Alexey had described in his messages: a “short project on their end, kind of collab.” At a later date, Michael made the comments private on both reels probably due to backlash from the #BringBoomBack movement.
Alexey then made “skibillion dollars“, an animation that also teased the design of anticipated character the “Watchman Of Doom”, giving fans hope at what this creative collaboration might eventually produce.
June 12, 2025
Following the release of episode 79 part 1, Alexey participated in a Q&A with a creator named Steak on his Discord server. When asked how he felt about the movie or short, he said, “Yeah, very!” “I’m so excited I’m gonna spam Michael Bay’s direct with various Instagram brainrot 🤙 iykyk what kind of brainrot IG has 💀🙏”
The same Q&A offered one more piece of context that reframed the broader story. They asked Alexey what his favorite episode was, he replied that episode 50 held a special place, not just because of the creative intensity involved in making it, but because it was the first time he had spoken with Michael Bay. “I had to lock in to impress,” he said.
Alexey had been in the orbit of Michael Bay’s attention before most of the world knew Michael Bay had any interest in Skibidi Toilet at all. Here is a full breakdown of the Skibidi Toilet movie situation if you want a more concise and precise analysis of the story. Made by community member @Musakhar167: