In the field of destination branding, the biggest challenge for marketers is how to build close emotional ties between the potential visitors and the locations. Among all the possible media channels to promote destinations, movies are believed to be important motivators for mass tourism. The emotionally based images from movies can provide some essential differentiation of places, and help them to compete in a crowded marketplace. This study explored how entertainment movies, as autonomous image formation agents, influence viewers' perceptions of the places portrayed and consequent visitation interest. First, this study looked at the embedded places as products placed in the movies. On the basis of the Adapted Meaning Transfer Model, it explored whether movie genre will have any influence on people's place perceptions and visitation interest. On one hand, the study found that the violent crime movie had a significant negative impact on the viewers' affective and cognitive place images immediately after the movie exposure. On the other hand, the results demonstrated that, contrary to the expectations, the romantic drama did not generate any significant positive impact on the viewers immediately after the movie exposure. Secondly, based on the Transportation Theory, this study explored movie transportation's role in the relationship between movie watching and tourism. Movie transportation is defined as the state of immersion into a movie. The results indicated that movie transportation had a significant impact on the viewers' affective place images, cognitive places images, and visitation interest. Particularly, regardless of movie genre, the more the movie viewers were transported, the more favorable impressions they had for the featured tourism sites and consequently the more interested they were in traveling to the target place. Moreover, this study explored which was more powerful: the movie genre's effect or the movie transportation's impact. The findings demonstrated that movie transportation did, to a large degree, weaken movie genre's influence. Particularly, for the highly transported audience, there were no significant differences between the movie groups in terms of their perceptions of place pleasantness, tourism attraction, and community quality. However, significant differences were found among the audience that was not well transported. This suggests that movie transportation is an essential mechanism by which movies can influence place perceptions and visitation interest. The effect of movie transportation is more powerful than the effect of movie genre. Dark movies still have the potential to enhance place images if they can transport the audience well. In addition, movie transportation's influence was evaluated when the variance of initial place familiarity was considered. The results indicated that initial place familiarity generally had a significant positive impact on the audiences' cognitive place images and visitation interest, regardless of movie genre. Moreover, it also found that movie transportation is a significant moderator of initial place familiarity's influence on affective place images. Last but not least, this study made an attempt to explore movies' long-term impact. The results showed that movie genres' main effect, movie transportation's main effect, and movie transportation's moderation effect were all meaningful on a long-term basis.
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