But It Came Out In 2007 Directed By Michael Bay

2022viral videoclassic

A late-August 2022 Twitter editing trend where creators score the final shot of unrelated films with Linkin Park's 'What I've Done', mimicking the exact transition Michael Bay used at the end of the 2007 movie Transformers. The title card is timed to land on the word 'Done', often followed by a fake 'Directed by Michael Bay' credit.

Overview

'But It Came Out In 2007 Directed By Michael Bay' is a video editing trend where creators splice Linkin Park's 'What I've Done' over the closing seconds of unrelated films, imitating the exact transition Michael Bay used at the end of the 2007 movie Transformers3. The piano intro plays under the last shot, the film's title card slams onto screen at the moment Chester Bennington sings 'Done', and many edits push through to a mocked-up 'Directed by Michael Bay' director credit for the punchline.

Follow-up edits stuck to a tight set of rules: piano cue under the final dialogue, on-beat logo drop, and often the Bay credit even when the actual director had nothing to do with the source film. A canonical version is @TheChunkierBean's Halo 2 edit, which applied the template beat-for-beat to a video game cutscene2.

How It Spread

Within days a cluster of imitations went up. On August 18, 2022, @mane_tank overlaid the song on the finale of Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers and picked up around 940 retweets and 3,200 likes over the following week4. Two days later, @TheChunkierBean applied the treatment to Halo 2 and gathered over 2,800 retweets and 26,000 likes in four days2.

The trend spiked hard on August 22 and 23, 2022. @AlingMedia's cut of The Godfather hit roughly 9,400 retweets and 54,000 likes in a single day5. @EzraCubero's version using Rian Johnson's Knives Out cleared 5,500 retweets and 47,000 likes in the same window6.

As the format ran out of easy targets, users started porting it to other eras. Edits paired Disturbed's 'Down with the Sickness' with the ending of Eyes Wide Shut, Smash Mouth's 'All Star' with The Godfather (as if from 1999), and Imogen Heap's 'Hide and Seek' with the finale of Schitt's Creek (as if from 2005), stretching the joke past its Michael Bay roots3.

How to Use This Meme

Pick a film, show or game with a distinct closing shot. Drop the piano opening of Linkin Park's 'What I've Done' under the last few seconds of dialogue. Time the cut so the title card appears exactly on the word 'Done', then let the track continue into a credits crawl. The 'Directed by Michael Bay' line is a common closer even when the source has nothing to do with him, echoing the original Jurassic World template from @CastCretaceous1.

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