Just last week we saw the teaser trailer for Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, the second Transformers live-action movie not directed by Michael Bay. ROTB director Steven Caple, Jr. even worked on the pilot episode from Transformers: EarthSpark and seemed to leaning more towards the BumbleBee movie, the first live-action movie that a huge part of the fanbase has nice things to say about, and things looked positive. I had some good hopes.
It was also last week that I did a commentary about using representation not for positive representation of minorities but as a mixture of propaganda and a cheap marketing tool, weaponizing the culture war to defend movies that do not give people of color a good showing but you need to support or you will be branded racist…as if black people don’t deserve to have a good movie made about them or there weren’t existing black, Latino, female, and even gay characters to be utilized without altering existing characters because it gets them positive press.
I didn’t think the two articles had any connection. Yes, both the movie and EarthSpark have minority casts but just having minorities doesn’t make a movie propaganda and there have been few people of color outside of white and Japanese in this franchise among the humans. There were black and Latino people, but it has been overwhelmingly white and Japanese…and the Japanese art style is often mistaken for “white” among the surface viewers who can’t take more than five seconds to actually have a clue what they’re talking about.
So now we have Caple and lead actor Anthony Ramos being interviewed by BET, and while it’s not surprising that Black Entertainment Television’s website would want to highlight the number of black people involved in front of and behind the camera, the interview is making a few people wonder if the movie is going to be propaganda or if this is just more cheap marketing. And marketing can hurt a movie or show. Ask the creator of the Netflix series First Kill, who blamed the show’s cancelation on the marketing of the show, focusing more on the lesbian romance between a human and vampire rather on the actual story surrounding the Romana and Juliet story about battling vampires and werewolves and such in which the romance was only subplot instead of main plot as it was marketed. Marketing is important and this interview with BET may not be helping Rise Of The Beasts.
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