Three of my friends and I went to the cinema yesterday to see the film "Taken", it was a lot better than I expected, but was still the classic Borne style thriller, but obviously not quite as good. When watching 28 Days Later with one of these friends a week before we noticed MAJOR product placement of Pepsi and Maltesers, and what seemed to be anti-placement. We spotted a couple of product placements in Taken as well, but no where near as bad. These films got me thinking, everybody always has a go at films like iRobot for silly amounts of obvious product placement, but nobody ever stops to think "I wonder if they are doing product anti-placement" (I made this phrase up so they probably wont be thinking literally this). Within 28 Days Later the classic was Pepsi's obvious roll in funding this film, in the city of London during a zombie attack where there is no power other than battery power, and the only thing in a small shop they break into that is working fine is the big illuminated Pepsi vending machine. But the best part was when one of the characters offers another a drink, "We've got Pepsi! or Lilt". Needless to say the character takes the Pepsi and drinks this refreshing zombie-busting soda with the can in perfect line showing off the cool Pepsi design for a good 2 or 3 seconds. The lilt's fate however is somewhat different, I believe it ends up getting thrown at a coming zombie, im sure the subliminal messaging behind that is "Lilt is manufactured by the Coca Cola company, don't you dare drink it, it's only good for using as a slightly weighted throwing weapon against an un-dead enemy." That's what I got out of it anyway.
The point I'm getting to is, I reckon that films make quite a lot of money within the meeting of placement where the (carrying on the example) heads of Pepsi said "We will give you x amount of money if you include our product a certain amount of times, and more money in bonus if you slag off our opposition companies."
Now I can't help but see it everywhere which is kind
of sad, oh well, that's film for you!
