Exclusive new image from Michael Bay’s Armageddon prequel!

BURBANK, December 5, 2006: Touchstone Pictures announces that famous blockbuster director Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor, The Island, Playboy Video Centerfold: Kerri Kendall) has begun principal photography on his next extra-huge movie, a prequel to one of his many, many totally massive cinematic masterpieces, Armageddon.

In the much-anticipated prequel – Another Armageddon Again: Truman’s Target – And Everybody Could Really Die This Time – super-mega-cool Michael Bay will explore the backstory of Billy Bob Thornton’s “Dan Truman” character. In the exclusive image above, we see Truman – a crack fighter pilot and hotshot member of the space program who lives fast and plays by his own rules – giving a lecture to a multiracial group of fashion model-like school children. In this pivotal scene, Truman gets some bad news and learns that the entire planet is about to have a very, very bad day! The awesome director/action extravaganza auteur Michael Bay tells us:

See, right when he’s standing in this classroom he hears on his radio-thing that a comet is going to hit the schoolhouse. Now keep in mind that a comet is totally different from an asteroid like I did last time. And these kids are, like, brilliant, genius-level students or something and Truman gathers a ragtag force of them together to build a rocket in their schoolyard and go destroy the comet. And Billy Bob ends up hurting his leg somehow on the mission and one of the kids who’s an engineer builds him that metal brace thingy – that’s how we tie it into the first Armageddon ’cause then he’s got something to prove. Oh, and all of the kids get killed in a bunch of slow-motion action scenes. This movie is gonna blow you away. Oh, and there will be shots of American flags, too.

In an unprecedented production schedule ever attempted by a director with only two box office failures under his belt, Bay and Touchstone will shoot AAA:TT-AECRDTT for the next three weeks only. Bay will then enter post-production immediately in order to have sufficient time for his signature editing process to meet the film’s June 12, 2009 release date.

“We should just about make it,” Bay says. “This will be my editingest movie ever!”

(If you hadn’t realized by now, the image above is from The Astronaut Farmer, a Warner Bros. movie coming out next year about an astronaut, forced into retirement, who builds a rocket in his barn with a wacky plan to launch it into space. The original picture can be found here via RopeofSilicon.com. And the awful, cloying trailer can be found here. Gee, an inspirational movie about a dreamer who wants to do something big that everyone tells him can’t be done; multiple camera angles at the end of the trailer of people looking into the sky with wonder; how do you suppose this thing ends? Blech.)