Electric Dreamstate

As I was cruising the interweb today I came across a rather strange promotion for the new Transformers movie. If you go to Transformersmovie.com you can submit a line that you want Optimus Prime to say in the upcoming movie (the teaser of which got an ovation when I saw it in Times Square in July BTW).

This is quite interesting to me for a couple of reasons. The first is that this is the first example I've seen of Snakes on a Plane type movie making beyond Snakes on a Plane. There, people on the internet suggested scenes and then those scenes were incorporated into the movie ("get this snake off my dick!" was one such scene). This gives the people of the internet a greater sense of ownership over the creative process of the movie and makes it more likely for them to see it. It also means that internet memes can make their way into mainstream movies.

This is fine and dandy for movies like Snakes on a Plane and Transformers where the artistic vision is inherently a corporate one and it doesn't really matter if some wank on the internet wants to see something stupid, but I really hope this doesn't move in and replace test screenings as a way to fuck up perfectly good movies. It probably won't though.

The second reason that this interested me was that when you go to the site you get to see some of the lines submitted, and some of them are absolutely hilariously terrible. Like: "We may be parts, but we have hearts!". Awesome.

Posted by Daniel Kaszor on Sunday, October 08, 2006 at 12:36 p.m. | Permalink