Hacker Cinema
Transformers: Age of Extinction
2014 · Film · 165 min
Part of Transformers Collection
Directed by Michael Bay
Science FictionActionAdventure
As humanity picks up the pieces after the battle of Chicago, a shadowy group reveals itself in an attempt to control the direction of history…while an ancient, powerful new menace sets Earth in its crosshairs. With help from Cade Yeager, Optimus Prime and the Autobots rise to meet their most fearsome challenge yet.
2 negative5 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
The meaning of brainrot keeps changing. Originally(?), it refered to a particular extreme/ADHD content understood only by the perpetually online. Remixes of the spinning oiia cat are pretty good examples: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IxX_QHay02M
This neuroscientist seema to be throwing the label on all of TikTok or all short form video. This seems barely more sophisticated with grouping together Lawrence of Arabia and Transformers 4 as movies.
A movie can make back its budget just by being a hit in China.
This is how we get movies like Skyscraper(2018)[0]. $120M budget. $70M from US/Canada. $300 from "worldwide" and most of that was from China. Just the Chinese opening weekend alone was $48M.
Transformers: Age of Extinction. $210M budget. China alone provided $300M of profit.
All you need to do is hire Chinese actors for side characters, set a bit of your movie in China and not talk about Taiwan. Easy money =)
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5758778/
China has been pushing that propaganda for years. See the movie "Transformers: Age of Extinction", and also the Chinese made "The Wandering Earth", in which Chinese people speak mandarin to white people, and those white people understand just fine.
Honestly English being THE international language is certainly a reflection of the power of English speaking nations. It's no wonder China fancy having that.
I'm more interested in what those 20 movies are. I found:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981
1 Raiders of the Lost Ark 2 On Golden Pond 3 Superman II 4 Arthur 5 Stripes 6 The Cannonball Run 7 Chariots of Fire 8 For Your Eyes Only 9 The Four Seasons 10 Time Bandits
Of which I guess 2, 3, 8 isn't original.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014
1 American Sniper 2 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 3 Guardians of the Galaxy 4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 5 The LEGO Movie 6 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 7 Transformers: Age of Extinction 8 Maleficent 9 X-Men: Days of Future Past 10 Big Hero 6
Of which only 10 is original.
Moviebarcode [0] provides some nice visualizations [1][2][3] of the color palette of movies and other things.
[0] http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/
[1] http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/104685404787/transformers-age-of-extinction-2014
[2] http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3432016573/traffic-2000
[3] http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/8951346287/tron-legacy-2010-prints
It's US only. If you click on any of the titles in the table from the provided link, it shows the full breakdown. For Transformers: Age of Extinction, you get a summary that shows it was primarily international sales[1].
[1]: http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Transformers-Age-of-Extinction#tab=summary
"That modeling a gunshot or a sword stroke is much easier than trying to capture the nuance of a conversation."
I think that's really kind of true, though. If you look at the kinds of movies we export successfully, spectacle sells overseas a lot better than movies about conversation. Is it because mass audiences are dumb? I don't think so. Are the Chinese less sophisticated than us? No. So why is "Transformers Age of Extinction" a cash rake outside of the U.S., with 78% of its box office take coming from foreign markets, while something like "The Fault In Our Stars" only gets 19% of its money from overseas?
Because spectacle is easy, and more importantly, spectacle needs very little translation. A giant truck robot riding an even gianter dinosaur robot and wielding a giant sword speaks for itself. Movies about human interaction require a lot more translation. You need subtitles for all the text, and a good translation is difficult -- for one, film is a visual medium, and having to read subtitles distracts your visual attention more than being able to hear the dialogue and understand it. And even if you understand the words, that's not the same as understanding the context -- subtle nuances of wordplay can be lost in translation, and translation doesn't help with allusions to things that audiences may not be familiar with.
So what does that have to do with video games? Well, video games have always been rather limited in what they can convey. Early videogames especially, and since the author mentions Doom in passing, let's focus on Doom's level of technical sophistication. So much of what makes for conversation wasn't possible with Doom's level of technology. Forget anything but text -- Doom's audio was limited to a bunch of nearly-MIDI files and a handful of WAV files for sound effects. We didn't have MP3s yet, bandwidth and storage were both in short supply, and text to speech was rather eerie and easily identifiable as synthetic. You couldn't have inflection or tone to your dialogue.
At the same time, facial expression, body language -- all of those things are very difficult to convey in graphics that were 320x200 pixels with 256 colors. (They're also difficult to convey on modern high-res polygons; there's a reason we have the term uncanny valley.)
When Doom came out, I have absolutely no doubt it was easier to meaningfully convey violence against creatures from hell on Mars than it was to convey social interaction between people in the medium of video games. And in a lot of ways, I think that's still true.