The actor crowned the 2007 movie as the decade’s defining film during an A24 x Letterboxd chat with ‘Primetime’ director Lance Oppenheim.
ByTrey Alston
October 3, 2026
Key Takeaways
- Robert Pattinson named Michael Bay’s 2007 blockbuster “Transformers” the definitive movie of the 2000s during an A24 and Letterboxd video series called “The List.”
- Pattinson based his pick on the film’s visual texture, pointing to the “super bright, saturated colors and really glossy stuff” that defined early-2000s movies before fading out.
- The episode paired Pattinson with “Primetime” director Lance Oppenheim, who revealed that “Braveheart” became an inside joke from their film set after Pattinson repeatedly referenced it in texts.
Robert Pattinson has an answer for which film defined the 2000s, and it is unexpected.
Asked to name the decade’s essential movie, Pattinson landed on Michael Bay’s 2007 blockbuster Transformers, calling it “the definitive movie of the 2000s” with a smirk.
His reasoning was about texture, not robots. Early-2000s movies, he said, had “super bright, saturated colors and really glossy stuff,” an aesthetic he says culminated with Transformers before it phased out.
Pattinson made the revelation in “The List,” the recurring A24 and Letterboxd video series in which guests talk through the films that shaped them. This installment paired Pattinson with Lance Oppenheim, director of the A24 drama Primetime.
The eight titles they worked through run Transformers, Vanilla Sky, Scarface, Natural Born Killers, Braveheart, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Donnie Darko and Limitless. Pattinson singled out One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and A Clockwork Orange as films that mattered to him as an actor.
He was less certain about Tom Cruise. When Oppenheim said he judges people by whether they like Vanilla Sky, Pattinson paused before conceding, “I kinda like it!”
The Braveheart entry turned out to be an inside joke from the Primetime set, and Oppenheim explained why.
“The amount of times I have a text message from Rob being like ‘Braveheart. Think Braveheart.’ And me trying to decipher what he meant by it… I think I would run out of fingers if I tried to count it,” Oppenheim said.
Primetime is playing in theaters now, and Pattinson will once again grace the big screen in Dune: Part Three this December, with Matt Reeves’ Batman sequel due Feb. 18, 2028.
