Why Transformers: Age of Extinction is so successful in China?

       The movie Transformers series showed up in China in 2007. At that time, China’s domestic film market was beginning to increase. Transformers caught people’s eyes for the first time on a large scale in society. I remember my dad said to me that Transformers was so fantastic. So from that time, I began to pay attention to this movie. After I watched it, I thought: oh okay it was cool, so many advanced technologies, no wonder so many people like it. After that, Transformers began to open the Chinese film market until the 4^th movie Transformers: Age of Extinction caused a great disturbance and successfully earned a great share in Chinese film market.

       Here are some reasons why I think Transformers: Age of Extinction is so successful in China. First of all, I will use terms in Chapter 2: Effects of Media Message to address it. The stereotypes as a marketing strategy were interpreted very clearly in the movie. According to Sullivan (2013, p. 36), stereotypes are described as the predominant method through which all individuals perceive the world. Obviously, there are good guys and bad guys in this movie. Such as the Autobot Optimus Prime as a “good guy” and Megatron as a “bad guy”. Being a Chinese audience member, I would like to say most of us often put the focus on identifying who is the good one and who is the bad one. This is the first point. The second point, media propaganda was used before Transformers: Age of Extinction was screened in China. Media propaganda refers to the meaning to “disseminate or promote particular ideas” (Sullivan, 2013, p. 36). When the whole film production team of this movie was shooting some scenes in China, they put a lot of propaganda in media through popular Chinese website like Tencent and Sina, also through the most popular app like Weibo (assemble to Twitter). They also held a lot of press conferences when they were shooting some scenes in different cities. I could say that this film production teams use the power of media to direct the Chinese public’s receiving of information. For example: when audiences in China see this information, we think oh this movie has a lot of scenes that were shot in China, it was fun. We might decide to take a look at this movie.

       In this paragraph, I will use the term the audience commodity in Chapter 4: Media Ratings and Target Marketing to address the reason. Sullivan (2013, p. 81) shows the audience commodity lies in the fact that audiences perform labor for advertisers by learning about brands of consumer goods featured in the commercials, while we are socialized to think our media consumption is primarily a leisure-based activity. From this point, I could say that as an audience member seeing this movie in the movie theater it’s a leisure-based activity because when people go when they have time and they spend time to relax in the movie theater.

However, here is a bad thing I want to say. When I watched this movie in the movie theater, I saw a lot of product placement in it. As a communication student, I would like to say those product placements were so rigid. They put the product placement so intentionally, even I had other audience members say to me that there were so many product placements in this movie and they even used the term product placement! When I heard that, I thought that was so interesting.

       In conclusion, the reason why Transformer: Age of Extinction is so successful in China is because the film production team shot a lot of scenes in different cities in China, these places are all top-level scenic spots and there is a lot of product placements in the movie, and the products are from Chinese brands. For example the brand name Yili is a Chinese milk brand. Also, they invited famous and well-known Chinese celebrity like Bingbing Li to show up in the movie.

How I seeing myself as an audience start now on

Before I take this COMM 3P18 class, I didn’t realize that as a student I was being an audience basically all the time. Because every time we are listening to the lecture or participate in the seminar, we are audiences in certain ways. After the first two lectures of COMM 3P18, I start to know myself as an audience. I start to realize what is an audience and being an audience. Sullivan (2013, P.2) mentioned in the Introduction chapter in the textbook, audience has multiple meanings. For example, as a student in the COMM 3P19 lecture I was in the audience, this means that I was one of a number of individuals that listening to the lecture at the same time and place. So I was paying attention to the same lecture at the same time with other students. Second, I was part of the audience, because when I use laptop to access Sakai, I was viewing same media source as many of other students. But we were not located in the same place

In the textbook (Sullivan, 2013, P. 2), there are two notions. One is an information-based notion of the audience experience. For example, all Brock students use Sakai to check out daily-posted information and upload or download files. The transmission of view of the audiences emphasizes symbolic transaction between a speaker and a receiver. At this moment, I could say that Brock students and the webpage Sakai can be both in speaker and receiver, because when Brock students are speakers, it means we use Sakai to upload information, and Sakai as a media webpage receive the information that we upload. When Brock students are receivers, it means we use Sakai to download information. At this time, Sakai is the speaker.

In the textbook (Sullivan, 2013, P. 6), there are three models. The first is the audience-as-outcome. The textbook explains this model “sees people as being acted upon by media”; especially it reflects a concern about the power of media to produce detrimental effects on individuals, and by implication on society as a whole. I believe in this model, because I can see how the media effects on people in nowadays. Recently in China, there is a celebrity having depressive disorder I think its have been three or four years already, and suicide at his home just in September. This is shock news, because he was only 28. He as an audience, I can see that how the power of media affects on him, especially media violence is so rampant nowadays. He as a public figure and as an audience has to face all the comments and judgments from other people, no matter its bad or not. This is so stressed to a celebrity. The third model is audience-as-agent. I can use myself as an example. My daily habit is watching video on YouTube. I specific watch media content like Korean pop music video and horror movie introduction and narration. This is my interest it meets the definition selecting specific media content to fit their own needs and desires of the third model. 

This is how I start seeing myself as an audience in daily life after I have first two weeks lectures.