Some might say that when you've seen one Michael Bay movie, you've seen them all. Now it's emerged that viewers who recently paid to see the US director's latest blast-fest, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, may actually have been watching rejigged footage from his earlier movie The Island during key scenes.

A video posted on YouTube suggests that elements of two key action scenes were recycled from earlier material used in Bay's 2005 science-fiction movie, which starred Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. One of the segments in question is almost identical to a section of The Island, except that an enormous Transformer robot has been apparently superimposed on to the action via digital tinkering.

It's not the first time Bay has been accused of borrowing footage from earlier films. In the first Transformers movie, he reportedly purloined a shot of an aircraft carrier from his 2001 film Pearl Harbor. However, Transformers 3 was released amid a wave of hype over the fact it was shot in 3D, rather than being converted in post-production. Experts suggest the recycled scenes could not have been filmed in 3D, so must have been through a conversion process before they were inserted into the final film.

According to IGN, Bay and his team have explained away the use of the recycled footage as the result of an accident on set in which a tow-cable snapped, hitting film extra Gabriella Cedillo and resulting in a serious head injury, leaving her paralysed. In October, it was reported that Cedillo was suing Transformers producers over the incident, which resulted in her being airlifted to hospital via helicopter.

In more positive news for Bay and his team, Dark of the Moon opened at No 1 in the US at the weekend with $162.1m (£100.4m) in its first five days, a record for the Independence Day weekend. That did not stop star Shia LaBeouf badmouthing the series once again on the Jimmy Kimmel TV show on Thursday. The US actor, who previously described himself as being "not impressed" by 2009's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, joked that his new film was "still crap" during an exchange of banter with the talk show host.