13 Movies With Hilariously Inappropriate Product Placement

11. Any Product Placement In Fight Club

Product Placement: In the movie's establishing scenes, there are countless references to numerous commercial giants, with the line "I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct" and, of course, "When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks." In addition, director David Fincher claims that there is a Starbucks cup visible in every shot of the movie (some sources online claim even every frame, but this is unfounded). Oh, and there's a scene where Pitt and Norton's characters beat the snot out of a VW Beetle with a baseball bat. Why It's Inappropriate: Because, for the companies, there is absolutely no benefit of being featured here (and there's no way anyone paid to have their logo show up). Starbucks did, however, consent to having their name made fun of (after all, can anything really hurt them at this point?), though balked at the idea of the giant corporate art structure being used to destroy one of their stores, hence why the store front isn't shown during that scene The movie shows off the products to a point, but reinvents the meaning by having Edward Norton's protagonist appear to be weighed down by consumerism rather than benefiting from it (as product placement is engineered to demonstrate). One can only imagine how badly Fincher wanted to actually name a car company in the infamous "safety recall" monologue, but swift legal action would absolutely have followed.