17 Most Shameless Product Placements in Movies

Product placement is nothing new in films, but it often feels like filmmakers' attempts to shoehorn products in has become more shameless and blatant over the years, or perhaps we as viewers are just becoming more savvy to their tricks. The below range from forced shots which draw a distracting level of attention to the product, to those which more forgivably make a joke out of their own insistence. Either way, here are 17 films which particularly amused and infuriated us with their flagrant insertion of brand names into their films.

17. Eastern Promises - Foster's

This one goes unnoticed too often, perhaps because it's a relatively recent film, but it's also one of the most blatant spots of product placement in a film of the last few years. As a football stadium disperses its collective of pissed, rowdy footy fans in Eastern Promises, one such fan walks through a graveyard, carefully placing his can of Foster's beer on a gravestone, which director David Cronenberg - who I would expect to be above this sort of tomfoolery - generously lingers on for a number of seconds. The only reason this isn't higher up is because, in true Cronenberg style, the scene ends with a prompt subversion; the young man who put the can down then violently has his throat slit, and Cronenberg chooses to linger on the resulting bloody mess considerably longer than he did the product in question, which just about makes this transgression of taste forgiveable. Still, it goes to show that even the most independent and singular-minded directors aren't averse to an easy back-hander.