The success of Transformers 4 in China is as much technical as emotional. Paramount’s summer epic — a three-hour goulash of special effects, duelling automatons and baffling product placements — may have been drubbed by critics, but has landed squarely in the sweet spot of China’s new economy.
The cinema has become a prime grazing-ground of China’s growing middle-class — the hundreds of millions of people with disposable income and a leisure industry which, outside the silver screen, offers few options.
Across China, there are now at least 8,000 more cinema screens than in 2010, when Avatar came out: in Transformers 4’s opening week, the film was shown on half of China’s 18,000 cinema screens.
These numbers have convinced Hollywood that, if there is to