Paramount Pictures via Everett Collection
At the end of this week, Michael Bay will unleash Transformers: Age of Extinction — his fourth attempt to usurp the American lexicon with the sounds of metal crunching. While you can stumble into any crowd of mentally capacitated human beings and hear no shortage of reasons why, for the love of god, these movies need to stop, it is a particularly surprising source behind the charge to detain Bay’s film this time around: Beijing Pangu Investment Co. Ltd, the company that owns the Pangu Plaza hotel (featured in Age of Extinction) is demanding that Paramount remove all traces of the establishment from the theatrical cut of the movie to run in China.
Although this isn’t a particularly outlandish demand, there’s an addendum that makes it a bit funnier: per Cinemablend, Pangu would have been totally cool with the inclusion of its hotel, which it advertises (generously) as “dragon-shaped,” in the fourth Transformers film were the film to hold its premiere at said hotel. But this was not the case, making the whole legal ordeal come off as just a little catty. “What, you’re too good to have your premiere at our hotel? Fine! Then you can forget about using it in your movie!”
Of course, when you phrase it like that, it completely undermines the legal decisions that probably have a great deal of founding in the marketing policies of a successful company. But a hotel that prides itself as being shaped like a dragon is suing a movie about dinosaurs fighting robot dinosaurs, so I think we’re all fine with not taking the issue particularly seriously.
