A Chinese scenic park is suing US film studio Paramount Pictures over a product placement gone wrong, in the latest controversy to bedevil Hollywood’s love affair with China.
The grottoed landscape of southern China’s Wulong nature reserve caught the eye of Michael Bay, director of the fourth instalment of the Transformers franchise. He picked the site for a two-minute sequence during which its plunging chasms and natural flying buttresses are digitally incinerated in a fight between a giant alien robot and a mechanical, fire-breathing dinosaur.
But yesterday it emerged that the Chongqing Wulong Karst Tourism Association, which administers the area, is suing Paramount, which produced Transformers: Age of Extinction , alleging that the sequence might be confusing to the audience due to the absence of the Wulong nature preserve’s logo.