Seth’s World View

I was looking forward to watching the live action Transformers movie next summer, as I was an avid Transformers fan growing up. I don’t expect it to be any good, I just expect to see it. However, as John at The Movie Blog found it, Paramount doesn’t understand the nature of modern marketing nor does it think much of its movie fans. John, who has a readership of 1 Million for his blog, decided to create hype for the Transformers movie and posted 2 photos from the movie to help promote it. Paramount didn’t like it, and demanded he remove 1 of the photos, which he complied with. Shortly afterwards, he finds his site is shut down because Paramount had a problem with another Transformers photo they didn’t ask him to remove, and Paramount separately contacted his webhost and asked them to shut down his site. There’s more to the tale, as you can read yourself by following the above link.

I think I’ll just avoid Paramount movies for the near future…

Edit to add: Yes, it’s copyrighted material, and Paramount has the right to maintain control of their content and make sure it’s used in a way they want it to. While they could sue over it, it’s not worth suing over a few photos, especially when the person obeys a cease and desist letter. Modern marketing has become rather viral on the Internet, and many of these media companies are receiving tons of free publicity that they likely couldn’t even pay to produce. Instead of leveraging it, they are lamenting the demise of the centralized media industry and trying to maintain too much control. I probably give movie companies too much credit though. We’re talking about people who invest millions in producing safe, ‘can’t miss’ movies and investing millions of dollars in marketing them, only to lose money on their investment at the box office.