Every movie needs some sort of funding to get made, no
matter how much it costs. Equipment,
food, and (most of the time) crew members must be paid. Big budget movies obviously cost more than
the movies that are filmed home cameras.
A lot of work goes into getting funding.
Sometimes it involves asking many financiers for money. Sometimes it involves giving away some of the
creative freedom that a director or writer would normally have. Then there is the simple fact of product
placement.
Product placement has become increasingly prevalent in the
modern media world as people have moved away from network and cable television,
and instead gone to online subscription locations to get entertainment. Advertisers changed their strategies to get
their products to the masses. This
involved tying the products into the action at play in the shows. The same thing has been done in movies. Instead of having the characters use generic
technology, companies like Apple, Sony, and Microsoft will work with the people
making the movies to showcase their products.
Take, for example, the movie Daddy’s
Home. Near the beginning of the
movie, Will Ferrell’s character went on a tangent about all of the great things
his Ford Flex could do. It wasn’t a
person bragging about their car. He was
selling it. He was being the pitchman
for Ford.
This isn’t a new method of advertising products in
movies. One of the most notable product
placements was in 1982’s E.T. The
Extra-Terrestrial. The alien
character ate Reece’s Pieces throughout the movie, helping the sales of that
candy product rise. The knock-off of E.T., a 1988 movie I have covered called
Mac and Me, had an extended dance
sequence set in a McDonald’s restaurant.
It was an attempt to get people to realize how fun it could be to dine
at McDonald’s. The movie went so far as to
have Ronald show up and dance with everyone.
But that’s not where product placement stops. It could be used as a cute little discovery
of candy by a childlike extra-terrestrial, or a single scene diversion for
another alien that was going to a child’s party. Sometimes, however, product placement plays a
much more integral part to the story.
The story could be crafted around the product. The television show Community did that with an entire storyline that involved Subway
after the sandwich chain helped fund another season. That’s not what I want to focus on, though.
Jaws came out in
1975, and launched a franchise that went four movies deep. They were all simple enough stories. A shark attacked a place and the people
fought to stop it from chowing down on the local population. The first movie was a huge hit. The second movie wasn’t as successful, which
might explain what happened with the third movie.
Jaws 3-D, which
was released in 1983, was produced by a different team than the first two
installments. The location in which the
movie was set changed from the standard Amity Island setting of the prior two
films. It was instead set at SeaWorld in
Florida. That’s right. SeaWorld put their name on a Jaws movie. That’s product placement at its finest. The film was even shot on the SeaWorld
property. They were going to get all
that they could out of a third Jaws
movie.
This decision made no sense.
Sure, it raised awareness for SeaWorld and got it into people’s minds. It was advertising may have allowed people to
see SeaWorld as a more legitimate business than it had already been. The problem came from the movie that it
attached its name to. Using SeaWorld as
the location for Jaws 3-D seems like
it would make fewer people want to go to the amusement park. The original Jaws had the reputation of making people fear the water. People who watched the movie in the 1970s
wanted to stay away from watering holes.
Whether it was an ocean, a lake, or a swimming pool, there was always
the little bit of shark fear nibbling at people’s minds (I’m saying this as a
person born in 1990, but this is what I’ve heard of the Jaws phenomenon). Why would
SeaWorld want a piece of this fear?
Using their park as the location for Jaws
3-D was bound to instill a fear within viewers whenever they stepped onto
the SeaWorld property.
Luckily, the movie wasn’t nearly as successful as either of
the predecessors. That really depends on
your outlook of the situation, though.
If you’re like me and you think that the movie would have made people
not want to go to SeaWorld because a shark could somehow get into the park,
then the movie doing poorly kept that fear from permeating through the
movie-going population of 1983. If, on the
other hand, you think visuals of people being trapped in underwater walkways
that were filling up with water while a shark head-butted them would have made
people desire a trip to SeaWorld, the movie might not have lived up to
expectations. The people who had worked
on the advertising partnership between SeaWorld and Jaws 3-D were likely a little disappointed in what happened. It still surpassed its budget by a large
amount. It just wasn’t nearly as
successful as the first two outings for the series.
The fourth movie in the Jaws
franchise didn’t attempt any major product placement. There was no SeaWorld setting. It was a simple story of Ellen Brody going on
vacation in the Bahamas and encountering a shark that may or may not have
killed her son in Amity. Maybe it was
because the franchise was back with Universal instead of being in other
hands. Whatever the case, it didn’t help
the series as they floundered and stalled after four movies. Jaws:
The Revenge would be the final film in the franchise and would signal a
decline in the amount of relevant shark movies until the rise of intentional TV
B-movies like Avalanche Sharks, Sharknado, Sharktopus, and the Mega
Shark franchise that began in the late 2000s.
Product placement can be a great way to get brand
recognition. This is especially
important in the modern age when people will do whatever they can to avoid
commercials (except for movie trailers, or Super Bowl ads). The way to get your product noticed is no
longer about making people laugh in the moments between scenes in their
favourite television shows. It’s about
finding ways to integrate themselves into the movies or television shows that
people watch. They can be used as part
of the setting, such as SeaWorld in Jaws
3-D or Google in The Internship. They could be an important plot point, like
using the Dodge dealership in Monster
Trucks. Or they could be blatant
advertisements like the Autobots in Transformers
all being Chevy products. Whatever the
case, product placement won’t be going away any time soon. It’s the future of advertisement.
These notes are the future of this post:
- Jaws: The Revenge was suggested by @rosstmiller, who has also suggested Going Overboard, Jack and Jill, Leprechaun in the Hood, and Son of the Mask. I added Jaws 3-D because I wanted to.
- I mentioned both Sharknado and Mac and Me in this post.
- Louis Gossett Jr. was in Jaws 3-D. He was also in the Iron Eagle movies and provided a voice for the film Delgo.
- Jaws 3-D wasn’t the first time that we saw Dennis Quaid in the Sunday “Bad” Movies. He was also in Playing for Keeps.
- Lea Thompson made her film debut in Jaws 3-D. She would later star in Howard the Duck.
- Jaws: The Revenge featured two actors from Monster in the Closet. They were Terrence Beasor and David McCharen.
- J.D. Hall returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies with Jaws: The Revenge. He was previously seen in Mac and Me.
- Lillian Garrett, from Hamburger: The Motion Picture, came back to the Sunday “Bad” Movies this week in Jaws: The Revenge.
- Finally, Jan Rabson was in Jaws: The Revenge, as well as Theodore Rex.
- Have you seen Jaws 3-D or Jaws: The Revenge? Do you want to complain that I watched both but the majority of the writing this week only involved Jaws 3-D, which wasn’t the one suggested? There’s a comment section below where you can do all that.
- I’m always looking for more suggestions about what to watch. Find me on Twitter and let me know what to check out, or put the suggestions in the comments.
- If you have snapchat and you want to see some of the stuff I put up there (movie clips, Clarence, and sometimes other random observations), add me. jurassicgriffin
- For next week’s post, I’ll be taking a look at the sequel to one of the movies I watched early on in the Sunday “Bad” Movies. Samurai Cop 2 has come out since I began writing about bad movies and it seems like it would be a disservice to not cover that sequel to one of my favourite discoveries of the blog. So I’m going to sit down and I’m going to watch the sequel and hope it’s even half as entertaining as the original. I’ll give you my thoughts next week.
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