Earlier this week, Michael Bay walked the green carpet and premiered his new Transformers movie at a film festival in Moscow. (Russians, apparently oversaturated with red imagery, don’t follow American upholstery traditions.) According to a new piece in the Los Angeles Times, the festival was “conceived as a showcase for films extolling the Soviet Union.†Which made it a perfect venue for a series best known for being U.S. Army propaganda! The Russians, according to the Times, don’t see anything odd. “There is nothing American in Transformers, and it is far more like a Japanese video game than a U.S. movie,†said the film festival’s program director. And so there was Michael “Moscow†Bay, attempting to cement Hollywood’s inroads in developing markets.
The Times piece, which uses the premiere as a peg to look at Hollywood’s new opportunities abroad and especially in Russia, suggests Transformers isn’t the only movie genuflecting to the Kremlin. Cars 2’s villain was supposed to be Russian, but ended up being a German in an attempt to not antagonize Eastern-European audiences. And Captain America is going to be called The First Avenger there later this summer. Hollywood is betting Russians have more of a taste for vengeance than for America. Which is funny, since for decades Hollywood has tried to convince us that the former was directed at the latter.
Coming soon to a theater near Yuri? [LAT]