"Transformers 7" with everything, but every piece is a short board
In "Transformers 7", we can actually see the overall confusion of Hollywood live-action IP movies in recent years, and in the "post-Avengers era", all Hollywood IPs seem to be carefully "spinning in place".
Text | Zero One
Before the Dragon Boat Festival, the domestic film market did not have domestic blockbusters to join the battle at all, and the upper part of the film market in June was occupied by imported films such as "Spider-Man: Across the Universe", "Transformers: The Rise of Super Warriors" (hereinafter referred to as Transformers 7) and "The Flash" and "Crazy Element City".
Among them, "Transformers 7" may be the highest expected box office in the entire June screening. It is not difficult to understand, except for the first two films that are too old, regardless of the word-of-mouth, from "Transformers 3" in 2011 to "Bumblebee" in 2019, the box office in China has exceeded 1 billion yuan.
And "Transformers 7" is a new reboot of the series, with a production cost of up to $200 million, and also joined the giant forces in the "Super Warrior" animation full of feelings, with new characters such as Captain Orangutans and Yellow Leopard, how to look at it is a popcorn movie that sells 1 billion + levels, at least it should not be inferior to "Jurassic Park 3" and "Godzilla vs. King Kong" in the past two years.
But in the market in 2023, Transformers IP, Hollywood, visual effects blockbusters, which were once able to cover the box office, have all failed. "Transformers 7" performance in China and the international market is far below expectations, with a cumulative total of only 335 million yuan after six days of domestic release, which means that it is difficult to break through the 600 million yuan level in the end, and this box office figure will only be a fraction of "Change 4" and "Change 5"; What made Paramount even more embarrassing was that the film's North American market performance was also bad, only being the champion on the first day of its release, and was overtaken by "Spider-Man: Across the Universe" the next day, accumulating only $60.5 million in the first weekend.
The film's low box office isn't entirely a matter of quality. "Transformers 7" has a higher reputation performance in China and the international market than 2017's "Transformers 5", but the box office performance is much lower than the latter. In "Transformers 7", we can actually see the overall confusion of Hollywood live-action IP movies in recent years, and in the "post-Avengers era", all Hollywood IPs seem to be carefully "spinning in place".
1
The series created by "Exploding Shell" rises and falls
Perhaps we should sort it out first, what are the advantages of the previous "Transformers" series as an IP live-action movie?
Between 2007 and 2017, Michael Bay, the famous director who directed "Pearl Harbor", produced "Transformers" 1-5, leading the huge success of this IP movie, the first three were at their peak, the global box office rose from $700 million to $1.123 billion, the fourth film $1.104 billion was slightly lower than the third, and 2017's "Transformers 5" directly cut to $605 million, of which the 1.5 billion box office in China accounted for nearly 40%.
The advantages and disadvantages of the first five "Transformers" movies are very obvious. Michael Bay, known as "Exploding Bay" by audiences and film critics, gave the film a large number of action scenes and war scenes, the details of the fight between giant robots were depicted as violent aesthetics with sparks splashing and parts scattered everywhere, the details of the Autobot deformation as an absolute visual spectacle at the time, and the overall design innovation and aesthetic Autobot also added a lot to the movie.
But what is criticized is the thinness of the story line and Michael Bay's increasingly proliferating personal film style. After the advent of the era of 3D movies, the negative experience of this style of viewing experience reached the extreme in "Change 4", and at least 100 minutes out of 165 minutes were bombarded by various rotations and slow motion, and seeing vomiting and dizziness became a major pain point of public opinion at that time; In Michael Bay's five films, the human character as a foil is deeply rooted, and all the story routines of several films are almost the same, which has also become a difficult problem for the entire series.
After "Bumblebee" tested the waters in the form of a small-cost spin-off and achieved good results, Paramount and Hasbro began an attempt to restart the series, which is the "Transformers 7" in front of us.
Compared with the Michael Bay series, "Transformers 7" has two major changes: one is that the story line is retro back to the 90s, and the other is to join the "Super Warriors" force.
The IP of "Transformers" originated from the toy products cooperated between Hasbro and Japan's TAKARA, in order to match toy sales, Hasbro cooperated with Marvel in the early days to deeply process the story and launch serial comics, and in 1984 launched an animated series produced by Toei in Japan, which was later called "Transformers G1" 4 seasons of animation. Since then, with the popularity of animation and toys, a sequel "Super Warriors" (Battle of the Beasts) was spawned in 1996, which tells the story of the two camps of the future Big Mac and the primordial beast to travel back to prehistoric earth and fight.
The source of domestic post-80s and 90s audiences' feelings for the Transformers series actually comes from "Super Warriors", which is one of the reasons why "Transformers 7" is quite popular before the screening. "Super Warriors" is one of the first works to use 3D computer animation to produce a series of animated series, and its exquisite graphics can be described as unprecedented at the time, and the excitement and depth of the plot are also the best in animated series, integrating many dramatic conflict elements such as time travel, prehistoric earth, and extraterrestrial superintelligent life.
But under the blessing of "Super Warriors", "Transformers 7" did not give any surprises.
2
Want everything
The result is "not that taste" "Change 7"
In the opinion of Reading Entertainment Jun, the problem of "Transformers 7" is a typical "both want and all", and the result is that the four are different, and any advantages are gone.
The Los Angeles Weekly said of Change 4 at the time: "The director of the film opens your hood like a mechanic, and then the stall says: Everything is here, you can see for yourself." "And "Transformers 7" can be described as intensified -
Do you want minorities, marginalized people, we are logging? We all have it! You want Autobots to transform, King Kong, Iron Man? We all have it too! To make a big scene, we arranged a battlefield melee! I like the horror of closed scenes, and we also have a museum chase scene like "Alien"! We have it all!
Yes, "Transformers 7" does have everything, but after watching it, the audience can't remember anything and can't empathize.
In terms of the main story line, "Transformers 7" is exactly the same model as the past Michael Bay period - unsatisfactory human characters meet the Autobots by chance, get involved in a battle for an important artifact, first encounter failure, and finally play their own roles to win the war.
But the difference is that "Transformers 7" actually tries to add some new ideas. The male and female protagonists are typical marginal characters in society, and unlike the strong campus youth drama in the past, the two minority actors have almost no emotional drama, and the intelligent heroine setting is actually quite pleasing, not as boring as the "political correctness" that the public feared in advance.
The male protagonist is set as Optimus Prime's human control group, with family and team responsibilities, and his heart wanders between great love and selfishness, Optimus Prime gets a new concept from Optimus Saint, and the male protagonist's psychology is analyzed by the female protagonist, and a certain emotional understanding is reached between humans and Autobots.
But it's a pity that all of the above concepts are dragonflies in "Transformers 7". From a commercial point of view, there is no way to do this, two hours to join several robot wars, to shape the main characters in the four forces of Autobots, Big Macs, humans, villains and universe emperors, there is no extra time to give the characters fullness, and the script does not have enough wisdom to perfect all this in a shorter time, so these changes do not have any practical meaning, and the focus of the entire film is only "Transformers".
The new problem is that "Transformers 7" has not been able to reproduce the glory of the first three in terms of visual aesthetics. Although the quality of the special effects of the movie is excellent in the same period, it lacks the overall sense and memory point of the visual reality in the past, and we look back at the previous transformation battles and find that the presentation of details can make supporting characters such as "Inspector" have a very significant memory point, and can also make each fight of Optimus Prime have a particularly thick and intense texture.
And in "Transformers 7", everything becomes a bit like a Marvel movie - the final battle between Autobots + Big Mac and villains, almost like a replica of "Avengers 4", a chaotic battlefield, various "heroes" kill enemy minions and slaughter sheep, the resurrected "Bumblebee" at the time of crisis falls from the sky like Captain Marvel, and the male protagonist finally even wears a battle armor similar to Iron Man...
As an important emotional point, the "Super Warrior" is far less than the expected scenes, but like the robotic dinosaur in "Change 4", it is reduced to a background board - the flying arrow sacrifice does not transform into a scene, the Optimus Saint (Captain Orangutan) is a philosophical chatterbox, the yellow leopard and rhinoceros have almost no lines at all, and all the Big Mac characters only have a short transformation in the final battle. Power Warrior fans thought they were going to have a feast, but it turned out to be just a "tasting".
3
Why did Hollywood IP series fall into a "backward tide"?
In addition to "Spider-Man: Universe", which takes small steps in the form of animation, the probability of Hollywood IP masterpieces falling lower than expected in recent years is obviously getting higher and higher. "Jurassic World 3", the lowest box office in the series; "Ant-Man 3" refreshed the worst box office results of the sequel to the Marvel movie; "Fast and Furious 10", the lowest box office of the series since "Fast and Furious 7", not even comparable to the 2019 spin-off "Special Ops"; "Thunder Shazam 2" has only one-third of the global box office of the first part...
The series IP is stuck in a quagmire, and Yoyujun believes that there are two factors:
One is the unavoidable common problem of series of movies, that is, the "periodicity" of creation. Just like a large number of American dramas can be filmed forever as long as they are not rotten, until the final end, the capital market's extraction of film IP is almost certainly excessive. This is also why almost all series of IPs are high and low, because good ideas and visual spectacles have long been exhausted, and IPs like "Silver Guard 3" that can finish decently in the hands of the same director must be a minority.
Like the "Quick" series and the "Transformers" series, they are particularly obvious IP series that urgently need to be torn down, but for box office and commercial considerations, these two series must still pursue the emotional elements of the past series in the latest movies, and cannot make big changes in the plot and setting, and it is unlikely to bring surprises.
Just like "Transformers 7", it is clear that you can return to prehistoric Earth in the story blueprint of "Super Warriors", and open a new series with more sci-fi elements, a new animal transformation style, and much more interesting, but it is necessary to return to the 90s of the earth under the limitations of the old version of the movie universe, which is completely the result of capital risk investment.
The second is the stagnation and deterioration of the overall production industry environment in Hollywood. Many viewers will find that the visual effects performance of a large number of Hollywood movies in 2022 and 2023 is actually not as good as ten years ago - the level of special effects of "Transformers 7" is at most the same as in the past, and there are low-level mistakes in Optimus Prime special effects "wearing models" in the trailer; Marvel movies are the hardest hit area, "Ant-Man 3", "Black Panther 2" and "Thor 4" special effects texture is much lower than in the past, compared to the peak of "Iron Man" is even more difficult to reach. In addition to "Avatar 2", can you name other Hollywood movies that have improved special effects in the past two years?
Once used to use the combination of model real shooting + CG to create fake Hollywood special effects, now are basically patterned one-click dress-up, known as "nanotechnology", but in fact it is the same, textureless computer CG.
Director Guo Fan said during the Shanghai Film Festival, "It took us 8 years to catch up with the technology to the film and television industry 2.0 era, but I didn't expect that the industry 3.0 era is coming again, but this may also be an opportunity for us to overtake Hollywood." In fact, the regression of the special effects level of Hollywood movies is such a microcosm, the old industrial model has lost its advantage in cost, and the new technology still lacks the level of artistic synchronization, and the future film industry model is likely to be a complete subversion of the current mature model."
The same is true for screenwriting levels. Hollywood's largest screenwriting strike in nearly 15 years is still breaking out, and Disney's "Avatar" series, "Star Wars" series, and two "Avengers" series have been postponed.
Recently, it has become more and more difficult for us to see innovative IP stories, but a large number of "mutual learning" elements stacked and emotional gameplay - "Spider-Man 3" engages in three spiders in the same frame, "The Flash" finds the old Batman, "Furious 10" did not play and resurrected the old characters, all IP series seem to be learning Marvel's "Avengers", but the fact is that even Marvel itself can't play the cinematic universe, and after entering the multiverse narrative stage, Marvel's movie planning has never been confused before.
For all Hollywood IP movie series, the mediocre performance of "Furious 10" and "Transformers 7" in 2023 will definitely have a long-term impact, at least, being able to keep the IP does not mean that you can eat it forever.