- Award Snub: Six of his nine movies have been nominated for a combination of 16 Oscars, yet they have won only one award. Several critics have admitted this was on purpose and that his films had the best visuals and sound of the year; however they could not bring themselves to the vote for them because they were movies about things like giant robots from outer space which were based on a toyline. The one exception was for Pearl Harbor in the Sound Editing category and Monsters, Inc. was the only other movie nominated for the award that year.
- Growing the Beard: While The Island wasn't the hit people expected, it was praised for having a much more involving storyline than what usually appears in his films. And yet the film failed to make money.
- Memetic Badass: "You mess with Michael Bay and you mess with America!"
- Memetic Mutation: "What if Michael Bay directed X?"
- Never Live It Down: Ever since the release of the Bayverse, he has a reputation in the geek fandom for disregarding the source material and throwing in a few Ethnic Scrappies.
- No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: The way people describe his movies, you'd think they were the worst things ever made. You wouldn't know this by looking at the sales figures for Transformers.
- Overshadowed by Controversy: Though he's already a controversial director like Zack Snyder, Bay's reputation has started to worsen since the release of the live-action Transformers film series (this reaction finally takes effect after the release of its sequels) and later the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles duology (though he was a producer for both of these films), where his questionable directions and execution of both the stories and characters had led plenty of the franchises' long-time fans to label him as a "Childhood Murderer" or any other derogatory names. As for the former franchise, his stigma remains even if he's still the producer for The Transformers Rebootverse and One.
- Scapegoat Creator: His name being attached to a movie causes him to absorb much of the backlash if a film is negatively received.
- Although not entirely blameless for the film's problems, Bay did not put the Romantic Plot Tumor into Pearl Harbor. That was Randall Wallace. Also, he swears that it was Executive Meddling that tried to turn it into another Titanic.
- One review of Alone in The Dark described a confusing shot, and the reviewer actually wrote, "Michael Bay has a lot to answer for." Blaming Bay for a Uwe Boll movie's problems.
- Transformers:
- Believe it or not, but there are certain fans that blame Michael Bay for the different robot designs used in the Transformers movies as if he personally drew them up himself. Nevermind the fact that EVERY different Transformers series features a new style.
- Despite being the director, and not a writer, he absorbs most people's critiques about the film's stories and their more divisive characters. On the flipside though, anything that the fandom really liked, like Blackout and Barricade, he got the credit for.
- The Hatedom is so strong for some people that they're willing to write off any movie that Bay is involved in producing as being horrible before it even comes out. Never mind that it's his production company that's been producing the recent horror movie reboots (Chainsaw, Elm Street, Friday the 13th), but he's not the sole producer.
- Though the first movie is already despised, The Purge franchise increasing focus on political matters with incredibly obvious jabs at the Republican and Libertarian parties of America is blamed on Bay thanks to him being a vocal democrat, though he is only one of several producers.
- True Art Is Not Popular: The Island was held by critics as probably his best movie, but bombed at the domestic box office. Strangely it is his only non Bad Boys film not to be nominated for an Oscar
- Visual Effects of Awesome: Every film he has made with extensive visual effects has been praised for the level of detail and pushing the prior boundaries, even if the film as a whole may have been flawed. Even George Lucas admitted to looking to Pearl Harbor for inspiration on the opening sequence of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.
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