From Screened Place to Lived Place: Cinematic-Place Negotiation Among Film Tourists

Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, widely associated with the landscapes depicted in Avatar, attracts tourists from around the world and has become an important film tourism destination. Film tourism destinations are not only physical places but also mediated symbolic spaces shaped by cinematic imagery, media memories, and symbolic expectations formed before travel. This study investigates how film tourists transform cinematically mediated expectations into situated engagement during their visits to Zhangjiajie. It adopts a qualitative process design informed by grounded theory and draws on semi-structured interviews with 30 film-aware tourists who had visited Zhangjiajie. The findings show that engagement unfolds through pre-visit cinematic imagination, embodied encounters, cinematic–real-world comparisons, social interpretation, authenticity negotiation, emotional connection, and cultural place-making. The study develops the concept of cinematic-place negotiation to explain how a screen-mediated place is transformed into a lived place through tourists’ comparison, verification, revision, and extension of media-shaped expectations.