Rob Moore, the vice chairman, told China Daily the latest movie features a variety of Chinese brands placed in the storyline.The question in this case is how heavy handed the advertisements might be and will they prove disruptive like they were in Iron Man 3's four minutes of commercial interruptions. For years now Hollywood has used their movies to offset budget costs with product placements. Sometimes it a pure business transaction of pay X bucks to show off Y product, sometimes its to get something expensive for free (the fleet of vehicles used in all four Transformers films) and other times its actually not that obvious unless looking for it (like Man of Steel honest trailer points out) but in most cases it no accident when a store or product is displayed on screen in a way to make sure you see exactly what the product is (ever notice that green Hyundai always looks so shiny, clean and always starts in the Walking Dead?).
“This certainly goes hand in hand with the amount of time that we were in Chinese locations,” Moore said.
“Having those products certainly reinforces the fact that this is Chinese culture and that there is a lot of story-telling happening there.”
He would not say how many Chinese brands are in the film, but sources have confirmed that the products include drinking water, a car and a duck-meat snack.
Transformers has always relied on product placement, you know besides being a long version toy commercial. Remember the Mountain Dew machine and X-Box transforming in the first movie? Bay got better at if after that but there was plenty of product placement in in all three movies even if not entirely aware of it. For Transformers: Age of Extinction we already know that Victoria's Secret (whose commercial's Bay frequently directs) will get prominent placement in a Hong Kong set action sequence. For American audiences probably not so much as will not understand most of the advertisements on screen but I will be curious to know if it becomes a problem for Chinese audiences.
Besides the product placement, China will enjoy its own version of product placement with multiple locations being on display (good for tourist dollars among other things) as there will be some lovely eye candy in the form of Li Bingbing who will be in the movie for around 30 minutes (so much more time than the US filming would have suggested). While talking about that, Moore indicated that production filmed at a "very cold place". (via TFW2005)
I didn't notice any chinese product placement in Iron Man 3.
ReplyDeleteChinese Product Placement on Iron Man 3 was for the Chinese Audience only. It was a special version of the movie that was not shown anywhere else in the world. It even had Iron Man drinking (shoehorned) a branded Chinese milk. Imagine that... :-D
ReplyDeletehttp://www.tfw2005.com/transformers-news/transformers-movie-just-movie-31/paramount-says-transformers-5-6-depends-on-the-success-of-transformers-4-age-of-extinction-178784/
ReplyDeleteThis is old news. It's the way all Transformers movies were made. Not one TF sequel was announced before the big box office numbers of the playing movie were in.
DeleteAlso, Bay makes a movie as it is hit last, not expecting to make a sequel, so I bet on it this movie to NOT have a cliffhanger. Yes maybe Optimus takes a dangerous weapon into space, but I think it will not have a wink at something bigger like Unicron for the next movie.
But it's safe to say TF 5 and 6 are inevitable, TF: AOE will perform huge and I think it wil do even better than DOTM, bc it has the Dinobots, new designs and an all new cast. Everybody wants to see that.