Boundary-pushing Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Morgan Spurlock explores the world of product placement, marketing and advertising in POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, a film that was fully financed through product placement from various brands, all of which are integrated transparently into the film.
Ever since Morgan Spurlock came out with the Oscar Nominated ‘Super Size Me’ in 2004 where he explored the consequences on his own health for a month while eating only McDonalds I have always been a fan, from there hes gone on to produce and star in a fair few more documentaries, his most notable was the TV Series ’30 Days’ where people are put in completely opposite lifestyles to there beliefs, religion and/or profession for 30 days. This time around hes diving into the billion dollar industry of advertising and product placement in films.
Product placement is rife within the film industry I highly doubt there wouldn’t be one film these days that hasn’t got it somewhere, so what Spurlock attempts to do is produce a documentry that is completely funded from advertising, the film itself consists of Spurlock having numerous meetings, trying to find partners and ideally getting them to sign on the bottom line, we get to see inside the boardroom where basically he tells them ‘your in the film right now’. Its a pretty smart film these days you see advertising everywhere.. if you want to see a film full of it just watch Michael Bay’s ‘The Island’ I don’t think theres 30seconds without some sort of product placement.
Spurlock manages to pull in about 21 companies in all, with POM Wonderful a pomegranate juice drink coming on board with the most money so they claimed the title rights “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold”. He also gets advertising coin from companies such as Hyatt, Jetblue, Merrell, Mini, Trident and Old Navy (just to name a few). Theres also a whole bunch of cameo’s from people like J.J Abrams, Brett Ratner, Music Producer L.A Reid and even Quentin Tarantino! It was great to see the other side of film making, how the deals go down, whats required in the contracts etc for instance with POM Wonderful they didn’t just get the name rights they also became the official drink of the film so anytime Spurlock was on screen after the deal was done he would have a POM Drink in his hand and funnily enough last week when he was in Australia promoting the film he had one in his hand then aswell.
I really enjoyed the film, but I would have liked to have seen more I don’t know if a film about Film advertising would excite everyone but its still a great watch and for anyone thinking about trying to get some of the proverbial fat cash from advertising this might even be an insight on how to go about it. I will be extremely interested to see what comes next for Spurlock, rumour has it that its going to be based around Comic Con the biggest Pop Culture/Film Convention in the world.. we shall soon see.
POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is in cinemas on the 11th August. I give this film 3 out of 5 stars.
You can check the trailer out of ‘The Greatest Movie Ever Sold’ here.