Earlier last week, Chinese property company Pangu Holdings abruptly cancelled its sponsorship of Transformers: Age of Extinction. Pangu Holdings, which owns and operates the Pangu 7 Star Hotel in Beijing, now wants to have its image removed from the movie. The Pangu hotel is huge.
Chinese and Western outlets such as Variety have reported on the situation. Effectively, Pangu feels that its partnership with Paramount pictures and its associates isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Pangu Holdings now wants to have its logos and images removed from marketing and distribution materials.
This is where things get odd. Marketing and distribution materials equate to everything from posters to the film itself. Pangu wants Paramount to remove Pangu and its images from the movie.
In a statement quoted from the Variety article, Pangu writes “When marketing and distributing ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction,’ (the studio) is not allowed to use our company’s image, logo, our building’s inside and outside views and its recognisable elements.” The statement continues, “If already used in the film, they shall all be deleted.”
Now here’s the thing. According to pre-release information, Transformers 4 has about 30 minutes of footage that takes place in China. While most of the footage is supposed to feature Guangzhou and Hong Kong, there are parts that take place in Beijing, particularly Olympic Park, where the Pangu building is. In that area the only things that stand out are the Beijing National Stadium (The Birds Nest), the National Aquatics Center (the water cube) and the Pangu Building.
Paramount has also said that Pangu Plaza has a prominent placement within the film. Which is interesting because Pangu Plaza is very… bland.
The building is supposedly shaped like a dragon and is literally just five buildings with an interconnected ground level walkway. This building is huge and very much iconic to the post-Olympic Beijing. The tallest building houses corporate offices, it’s the home of IBM in Beijing. The last building, the tail end, is the 7 Star Hotel
Unless the shots of Transformers in Beijing are facing away from the Pangu, it will be hard for an editor to remove the whole building from the background while Optimus Prime lays the smackdown on some Decepticons.
At the same time that Pangu is trying to get its images removed from the movie, the hotel seems to be using Transformers as a marketing gimmick. As of noon today, there is a statue of Bumblebee standing in front of the hotel entrance. Staff at the hotel claim that the statue’s been up for a few months and that passersby often stop by for a photo-op.
Seems kind of two-faced to me. Then again, I’ve never been to a seven star hotel. Five star yes, seven… not yet.
Transformers: Age of Extinction will be in theatres in Beijing on June 27.
Update: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the dispute between Pangu Holdings and Paramount is being resolved. It appears to have been a misunderstanding with contracts involving two other Chinese parties.
Comments
10 responses to “This Boring 7 Star Hotel Wants To Be Removed From Transformers 4”
I would want to be removed from any and all Transformers movies as well.
Exactly what i was going to post! Word for ford.
BOO PANGU
They left it a bit late. All the promotional material has been everywhere for ages, not to mention the fact that all the cinemas should have received their copies of the film by now (ours arrived last night).
Or they could paint it out or replace it with another building digitally?
Similar to how they add in all those giant robots.
Of course depending on the contract and Chinese filming laws they may not be obligated to change anything at all.
they could replace it with the car chase seen from The Island, i mean from that other Transformers movie
As someone who does precisely this sort of work (I’m an editor, though technically a task like this would go to a compositor), it wouldn’t actually be all that hard to roto out the hotel in “most” situations, I’d guess. It would, however, be time consuming.
Edit the building to look like a penis. Job done.
Is it just me or are the Chinese very pushy and think they are in total control when anything done in their country is put on film? First we had extra scenes added to Iron Man 3 specifically for Chinese audiences that focus on how “great” one of their scientists are, now we have a hotel wanting all images of it’s buildings removed even though they signed a contract allowing the images to be used.
Point of the story: Don’t trust the Chinese when making a movie
China’s an emerging monster (dragon?) in the film revenue space, so producers are pandering towards them quite a bit to get extra investment in their film. It’s a lot easier to break into the market if you have local support, and local support comes in the form of annoying little placement deals like this.
I’d say get stuffed, you’re allowed to film in public places.
The real story is that the hotel managers saw the film and realised they didn’t want their hotel to be associated with a (quote): “Huge piece of Hollywood dog shit”.