If you want to ruin Morgan Spurlock’s fun at the movies, throw a logo onto someone’s shirt. Or stop the movie dead so the characters can discuss a sponsor’s product. Product placement so infuriates Spurlock that he just made a documentary about it, POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.
“There are so many times I’ve seen terrible things,” Spurlock says. “The Fantastic 4 sequel was one of the worst. The amount of product placement in that film… like when they pull the sheet off the Fantasti-car and there’s the Dodge logo! I was so taken out of that movie in every way. But that’s the power that product placement has to literally ruin a film experience.”
Over the years, product placement in film and TV has become a major source of revenue for movie studios worldwide. It’s just been announced that the next James Bond film has raised $45 million – one-third of its estimated budget – through product placement. But it’s not just the blockbusters that solicit these arrangements should you see current chick flick Something Borrowed, you may notice that it’s set in some weird alternate universe where Heineken is the only brand of beer ever produced, sold or consumed.
The news that Mad Men will incorporate product placement as a condition of its fifth-season renewal made us raise an eyebrow, since Don Draper and his colleagues have been developing campaigns around actual historical products all along. But now, evidently, the owners of those products will have more of a say in how their trademarks are represented. (It’s likely that American Airlines would have vetoed the use of a 1962 plane crash as a plot point in that season-two episode, for example.)
Asked if this is going to lead us to new, ridiculous levels of sponsor control, Spurlock smiles darkly and says that’s already happened.
“What was the movie with David Duchovny where they used Head & Shoulders to kill the aliens?”
Oh, right, Evolution.
Crap.
