Michael Bay Apologizes for Armageddon—No, It's Not the End of the World!

Filmmaker admits his 1998 blockbuster asteroid flick wasn't up to his exacting standards

It may have made a ton of money, but Michael Bay actually has some regrets about Armageddon.

So much so that the action director is apologizing for his 1998 disaster epic, which, despite making $553 million at the worldwide box office, was critically maligned by the critics who panned its outlandish cowboys-in-space plot.

And if you ask Bay, it was all because it was a rush job.

"I will apologize for Armageddon, because we had to do the whole movie in 16 weeks. It was a massive undertaking. That was not fair to the movie," Bay told the Miami Herald while hyping his latest flick, Pain & Gain, which opens Friday.

As for what he would've done to make it better (besides cutting out a weepy Liv Tyler)?

"I would redo the entire third act if I could," noted the helmer. "But the studio literally took the movie away from us. It was terrible."

Of course, he's referring to the part where Bruce Willis and his rowdy bunch of deep-sea oil drillers turned astronauts must land safely on an asteroid the size of Texas to plant a nuclear device that they hope will destroy the rock in time before it hits Earth.

Alas, Bay's wishes to make some last-minute adjustments went unheeded by the execs at Disney, which distributed the picture and wanted to meet its summer release window.

"My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I had to be in charge of that," he added. "I called James Cameron and asked, 'What do you do when you're doing all the effects yourself?' But the movie did fine."

Now how about a mea culpa for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen?