Before globalization reached critical mass, America pretty much owned the narrative ever since the conclusion of World War II. But there are other players on the stage (and screen) today, including those communists capitalists in China. If you ever scratch your head when something like Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters gets a sequel despite a relatively soft North American box office, just check the domestic and foreign grosses, because the international business is what turns the light green now. We’re not alone anymore. THEY are out there. From “Hollywood Transformed,” by Tom Shone in the Financial Times:

“Nobody said global takeover would be easy. On course to beating Avatar (2009) as the top-grossing film of all time at the Chinese box office, Transformers: Age of Extinction picked up a flurry of complaints from Chinese companies who had paid for their products to appear in the movie.

A Chinese takeaway chain that sells duck necks said it was ‘very dissatisfied’ with a three-second shot of its meat in a refrigerator; the Wulong Karst National Park was upset the US production team had mistaken a sign that read ‘Green Dragon Bridge’ for the park’s actual logo, and given the impression the park was near Hong Kong, when they are actually more than 700 miles apart. Clearly, the park owners had never seen Michael Bay’s movies, with their cheerful war on all manner of coherence: spatial, geographical, narratological.

‘Why do all the cars that fought in Hong Kong have their [steering] wheels on the left?’ one movie-goer asked on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, where many gathered to puzzle over the movie’s numerous product placements. ‘Why would a middle-aged man in the middle of the desert in Texas take out a China Construction Bank card to withdraw money from the ATM?’ asked another.

A fitting image, perhaps, for the new breed of eastward-bound Hollywood blockbuster, aimed at penetrating China’s ‘Great Wall’ quota system – limiting the number of foreign films shown and the profits passed on to its makers – by gaining coveted ‘co-production’ status.

Working with their Chinese counterparts, Jiaflix Enterprises and the China Movie Channel, the producers of the fourth Transformers film shot the movie partly in China. They also cast Chinese stars Li Bingbing and Han Geng in small roles, and made multiple product-placement deals with Chinese consumer brands, although by far the strangest endorsement in the film has to be for single-party, non-democratic rule. While western democracy is represented by a Cheney-esque goon heading up the CIA and running rings around an ineffectual president, the response of the Chinese government to alien invasion is one of efficient, disciplined resolve. ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction is a very patriotic film,’ noted Variety, ‘It’s just Chinese patriotism on the screen, not American.’”