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 4th
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.
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