After a couple of small appearances in early 2000s teen movies (the Olsen twins’ Holiday in the Sun, Lindsay Lohan’s Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen), Megan Fox became a superstar virtually overnight playing Mikaela Banes in Michael Bay’s 2007 big-budget blockbuster adaptation of Transformers. 
Men’s magazines like Maxim, Stuff, and GQ couldn’t get enough of her, and Hollywood cast her in potential blockbusters (Jonah Hex) and quirky pᴀssion projects (Jennifer’s Body) alike. Then her career hit a few snags, seemingly alienating much of Hollywood due to a feud with Bay that also involved Steven Spielberg.
The next phase of Fox’s career: a streak of box office bombs, projects that never got off the ground, and critically-skewered performances.
Fox’s most visible recent work: a short-lived Travel Channel series about ancient cultures called Legends of the Lost. So what happened to the actress for whom the Maxim “Hot 100” list was basically created? Here are some reasons why she may have fallen off the A-list.
She trashed her director (and her movies)
When most people verbally attack their boss and it gets back to them, they might get reprimanded or fired. When a movie star criticizes their high-powered director, it just might get them blacklisted throughout Hollywood. In the middle of what was supposed to be a fluff piece for the British magazine Wonderland in 2009, Fox issued a controversial reply to a question about working with Michael Bay.
“He’s like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad man reputation,” Fox said, equating her director on two Transformers movies to the power-mad general and emperor bent on conquering Europe in the early 1800s. Then Fox kept talking. “He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is.”
Fox also disparaged the Transformers franchise in Entertainment Weekly. “I can’t s*** on this movie because it did give me a career and open all these doors for me,” Fox said (via ComicBookMovie) about the first Transformers movie. “But I don’t want to blow smoke up people’s a**. People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting.” Even if Bay was a tyrant on set (and even if Revenge of the Fallen wasn’t a good movie), you just can’t throw around the “H” word — or mock other people’s work — in Hollywood and come out unscathed.
She was fired from Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Fox signed up to reprise her role of Mikaela Banes for the third Transformers movie, Dark of the Moon, and even attended some rehearsals. That’s all in spite of her comparing director Michael Bay to Hitler, and he was apparently willing to let bygones be bygones. But his boss — producer Steven Spielberg — couldn’t. After he directed the film Schindler’s List, he founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to combat bigotry and keep alive the stories of Holocaust survivors. It’s maybe not surprising, then, if he doesn’t take such talk lightly. Bay told GQ that when the cast convened, Fox “was in a different world, on her BlackBerry. You gotta stay focused. And you know, the Hitler thing. Steven said, ‘Fire her right now.'”
Spielberg denied this version of the events, and Fox’s reps told People, “It was her decision not to return.” But whether the stories from Bay, Spielberg, or Fox are accurate, screenwriters were left scrambling to rewrite the Dark of the Moon script to create a new character to replace Fox’s Mikaela, and the casting team was racing to find a new actress. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley eventually got the gig.
She’s difficult to work with
Megan Fox’s comments about Michael Bay and subsequent angering of Steven Spielberg earned her a reputation that she was “difficult.” Dealmaking Hollywood big sH๏τs generally don’t like to be criticized by actors. While she probably didn’t express herself in the most thoughtful way, Fox bore the brunt of the backlash from her remarks about the guy who directed her in two star-making Transformers movies. But it wasn’t just Bay and Spielberg who took issue with Fox’s atтιтude toward the franchise that made her a known enтιтy. Transformers: Dark of the Moon screenwriter Ehren Kruger told GQ in 2011 that while Fox showed up for the film’s early rehearsals, “she seemed like an actress who didn’t want to be a part of it. She was saying she wanted to, but she wasn’t acting like it.”
After Fox’s famous “Hitler comments,” three crew members who’d worked on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen released a savage statement trashing an actress they called “Ms. Sourpants,” “dumb-as-a-rock,” and an actress who would likely wind up “a porn star in the future.” Additionally, they said Fox is “thankless, classless, graceless” and “never smiles.”
Whether or not any of that vitriol is objectively true, it would certainly lead many in Hollywood to equate working with Fox with courting drama.