For all intents and purposes, every sign points to Michael Bay and the Transformers series going their separate ways after The Last Knight. Bay even wrote a goodbye letter to the franchise thanking everyone involved for five movies’ worth of explosions, robots fighting each other, and female characters introduced from the legs up. But there’s one person who thinks he might be faking it.

Mark Wahlberg, in an interview with Comicbook.com, says that he thinks the siren song of Transformers will call Bay back eventually.

You know it's one of those things where Michael has built this entire universe right, and he will decide what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. Right now he says he doesn't want to do another film and he says that after every film because they are so difficult to make and he pretty much has to do it single-handedly, even with all the help that he has because all of the movie is in his mind.… So he'll decide that and I would be hard pressed to see him walk away and put it in somebody else's control and care. I mean, that's just the Michael that I know, but you never know, sometimes people decide to move on, so we'll see what happens.

I’m one of those people who would rather take the reins on a group project than delegate tasks equally between members I wasn’t sure could handle it, and Bay has been at this for so long and immersed so deeply in these characters and stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if he came back to the series just because he couldn’t take watching someone else fumbling around with it. You almost can’t imagine a Transformers movie without him now.

Transformers: The Last Knight is now playing.

More From ScreenCrush