Michael Bay publicly blew off the critics who excoriated Transformers: Age of Extinction, and he’s laughing all the way to the bank. Not only did the fourth film in the franchise win the domestic box-office for the second week in a row, but it has already surpassed Avatar to become the biggest box-office hit in Chinese history. After only 10 days in Chinese theaters, Age of Extinction has grossed more than $221 million—$46 million more than it has made in the U.S.—and it likely passed James Cameron’s 2009 3-D adventure on Monday. The phenomenal success in China is no accident. Paramount and Bay paid special attention to the second-biggest and rapidly growing movie market after their last film, Dark of the Moon, grossed $165 million there. (In total, Dark of the Moon earned 69 percent of its total $1.1 billion haul abroad.) To gain greater access to Chinese theaters for Extinction, Paramount partnered with a China production company, cast Chinese actors Li Bingbing and Han Geng, shot scenes in China and Hong Kong—where the film premiered—and even sponsored a TV reality-show competition that awarded four small roles. The courtship paid off, with Transformers winning a prime release date in the Chinese marketplace, with few other big American movies opening against it or soon after it. According to the Los Angeles Times, the red-hot Chinese box office is up another 22 percent this year and is on pace to eclipse the U.S. market by 2018.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 20:14:31 +0000
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