Product placement is a necessary evil in big budget movies. Characters drinking Diet Coke may be just as distracting as them drinking unbranded Diet Cola, but it at least brings in a extra bit of budget. As with anything in Hollywood, some movies push it too far. Thankfully, as was the case with Man Of Steel and its corporate Smallville fight, audiences are smart enough to notice and endless ridicule it. The only film that seems to sneak through with a free pass is Back To The Future, which makes Pizza Hut and Pepsi Free references feel actually funny (and without that horrible aftertaste you get from a particularly forced joke). Yet regrettably, some films take it even further to the point where its hard to tell where the advert ends and the movie begins. The key culprit of this is when merchandising plays as big a role as the movie itself. If you were surprised at the arrival of G.I. Joe: Retaliation last year because you thought the first film didnt set the box office alight you were right; the main financial income for Rise Of The Cobra was the number of licensed action dolls it managed to sell. Be it putting selling pencil cases over story or product placement being pushed to the nth degree, there are plenty of films out there that were basically just feature-length adverts. After our previous article some months ago, today we bring you nine of the absolute worst offenders that we actually paid real money to see.
