THE BRAND THAT FEEDS YOU
Imagine, if you will, a cinematic universe packed with flashy VFX, shameless product placement, and characters from your childhood memories all glo’d up. Imagine nostalgic comfort films stretching across the globe, from screen to shining screen, propped up by a bottomless catalog of merchandise and brand tie-ins. It’s the dream of generations of corporate officers and marketing gurus. And it’s that dream which animates the new MCU — the nascent Mattel Cinematic Universe.
The concept of films featuring vintage merchandisable characters and iconic consumer goods has fast become a dominant trend across the mainstream film industry. This summer alone we can expect the long-awaited Barbie (fashion doll as feminist icon), The Beanie Bubble (chronicle of Beanie Babies market rise and fall), Gran Turismo (based on the racing simulation video game), Haunted Mansion (second film based on the popular Disney park ride/attraction), and so on. Such projects point toward a trending Hollywood market of brand movies that capitalize on nostalgia by featuring commodities and commodified characters as the primary narrative focus. The super-genre of brand movies is a supercharged vehicle for product placement, held together by interchangeable cinematic tropes, and steering us towards a world where art is predefined by the consumptive habits it inspires.
We can outline two general categories into which these films fall: the mythic origin story of brands and their creators, and the brand IP revival in which preexisting characters, games, worlds etc. are fitted to contemporary tastes. Despite formal differences, both types of films share common ends of reinvigorating interest in both iconic products and the marketing ideologies behind them. Furthermore, they alter cinematic form through the creation of an expansive promotional superstructure based on IP pre-awareness, and collaborative marketing techniques. The contemporary state of Hollywood has incorporated ritual mass viewing of long-form advertisements, a.k.a. The Brand Movie.
THE [MYTHIC] BRAND ORIGIN STORY
The mythic origin story portrays the arc of a product’s popular consumption in the framework of a biopic. Naturally these films are period pieces, and delights of the past are put on full display. An early scene in Air (2023) shows a restless Nike Basketball Talent Scout Sonny Voccaro, played by Matt Damon, walking through the aisles of a 7-Eleven after helping himself to a Blue Raspberry Slurpee®. A montage of vintage concessions lining the shelves ensues: Wheaties and Mr. T cereals, large Twinkie cakes, Wonder Bread, Hustler and Playboy magazines donning the names of yesteryear’s starlets, and a plentiful inventory of Kodak film stock behind the counter. Here, the introduction of nostalgia is a key ingredient in the suspension of our disbelief.
Depictions of the past are often treated as sacrosanct, especially when stamped with the sales pitch “based on a true story.” This claim only implies a vague proximity to reality, however it colors the depicted lives of corporate figures as both mundane and inimitable. The protagonist of the brand origin story is not exclusively the inventor of the product but rather its steadfast, and often obsessive, salesman who propelled the product into its heyday of popularity. Tension and conflict are revealed in boardrooms, and hashed out in depositions or over the phone on private jets.
Justice is arbitrary; fortunes are made and lost according to the volatile shifting tides of capitalist commerce. Therefore the underdog is the individual with the most risky business model who dares to increase efficiency regardless of its effect on workers (who are seldom mentioned). Worker organization and retaliation is not depicted or discussed, however “difficult decisions” and downsizing are common. The “true story” is subordinate to the “cinematic story” — Richard Montañez of Flamin’ Hot may not have received his promotion to “Multicultural Marketing Executive” in front of a factory floor of clapping workers but the conceit is that’s what should have happened. No matter that many details of Montañez’s memoir, which served as source material for the film, have since been discredited, including the foundational claim that he invented the hot Cheeto.
Tetris (2022) and Flamin’ Hot (2023) are prime examples of this formula, sharing success stories of immigrants with dreams that could not be realized anywhere other than the U.S. of A. where success is depicted as the direct result of exceptionality. Prototypes of this subgenre, such as The Social Network (2010) and The Founder (2017) (Facebook and McDonald’s origin stories respectively), treat their protagonists as antiheroes, though we all know their real-life counterparts “win” in the end anyways — they get the girl plus ownership of the multinational corporation. The ideology of attaining the American dream by means of ruthless persistence and elusion of accountability, repeated in film after film and ingrained in the praxis of the studio system itself, transforms subliminal pitches about the validity of commodity fetishism into spectacular fact.
AD MEDIA & NOSTALGIA
Those familiar with the QVC network or late-night infomercials are no stranger to the program-length ad. Spanning anywhere from thirty-minute blocks to several hours, such programming has often been relegated to the wee hours when few are actually looking at the TV screen, or to channels with the express purpose of helping people shop without leaving the house. Such programming hit its stride in the Reagan era deregulation of broadcasting, which was subsequently transformed by toy companies wishing to expand the profit potential of character licensing. Mark Fowler, Reagan-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), famously likened televisions to “toasters with pictures” and pioneered policies that allowed broadcasters to air unlimited advertising minutes per hour.
Prior to his appointment, a Hot Wheels TV program for children had been taken off the air on the charge that it was a thirty-minute advertisement for Mattel’s line of toy-cars. After the shake up, toy companies such as General Mills, with Strawberry Shortcake, and Mattel, with He-Man, launched a new marketing strategy in which the merchandise of a licensed character preceded its media content. Characters were created using test groups of children, merchandise was produced, and cheaply animated cartoons were syndicated with TV networks for Saturday morning and afterschool programming blocks. By reversing the media to merchandise pipeline, cutting edge children’s television became in effect advertisements for action figures, dolls, lunchboxes, pajamas, cereals etc., which already lined store shelves. Film was brought into the equation with the box office success of The Care Bears Movie (1985). The film adaptation of the colorful bears, originally designed for a line of greeting cards, grossed $23M on a budget of $2M.
In the film The Corporation (2003) advertising executive Lucy Hughes expounds a study conducted by her team which asked parents to record nagging habits of their children. Evaluating how, when, and why children nagged for toys, trips to amusement parks, fast food etc. helped advertisers pinpoint what scenarios most frequently led to a sale. Discussing the rationale behind the project she explained “[Children] are tomorrow’s adult consumers so start talking with them now. Build that relationship when they’re younger and you’ve got them as an adult.” Thus, the grooming of young audiences into ideal steadfast consumers became a self-reproducing act on the basis of nostalgia, and now irony.
The familiarity of nostalgic media is at once soothing and predictable, transporting audiences to older days when they perhaps felt less responsibility for their environments. We feel the mental reward of recognizing a symbol, image, character, etc. and can draw the conclusion that nothing shocking enough to disturb the fandom currency of the IP will occur. Audience predictions are likely to come true when much of our entertainment is recycled material informed by trending social media topics. Still, that confirmation can feel like an indicator of our own intelligence and consciousness as viewers. This phenomenon mirrors many of these films’ meta elements and use of irony, which pull back the curtain on plot points of which the characters are largely unaware — they talk directly to the camera or about the streaming service or studio that produced them, sometimes even critically.
Some viewers caught in a love-hate relationship with the media they consume make the distinction of watching programs “ironically,” claiming an elevated distance from the product by acknowledging its shortcomings. Hate-watching or not, predictability in film and TV grants a rare illusion of control for viewers that is only matched by the the decision to make a purchase or not.
The idealized vision of the past on which this nostalgia is predicated often fails to account for the socioeconomic and political issues which carry on today. Those children of the ’80s advertising renaissance have come of age, and the repackaging of nostalgia for both themselves and the next generation has become an automatic best practice of the entertainment industry.
Despite the early hiccup, Hot Wheels made its return to Saturday morning cartoons once Fowler took charge. Today you can indulge in an entire Hot Wheels universe that includes a competition game show where fans compete to make the coolest life-size Hot Wheels car, and an upcoming feature film helmed by JJ Abrams who says it will be “emotional and grounded and gritty.” Mattel is currently assessing their proverbial toybox for cinematically fertile and “toyetic” (read: merchandisable) material, and matchmaking IP with Hollywood’s biggest stars to race each production into development. Some filmmakers may imbue their film with self awareness, a subtle irony, a camp sensibility, homage to classic films of the past, and/or a social and aesthetic update to the characters and products they know and love, but nostalgia subsumes all, neutralizing hope of novelty and critique. Armed with the highest budgets, these films can reach new heights of thrilling spectacle from which few audiences are immune, not simply due to technical prowess but also the ubiquity of the promotional superstructure.
THE PROMOTIONAL SUPERSTRUCTURE
Over the course of the past year, Barbie (2023) has rolled out an extensive promotional campaign of seemingly perfect foresight. The film’s story follows Barbie as she ventures into the “real world” amid an existential crisis. Already, a deck of Barbie UNO cards can be bought on Amazon.com with images of the pre-iconic cast of characters (UNO is another Mattel IP holding in development.) The promotional campaign, involving over 100 brand collaborations, includes: BarbieXForever21(clothing and accessories), Malibu BarbieXColourpop (makeup), BarbieXSpiritHalloween (costumes), BarbieXProgressive (Insurance???), BarbieXAlamo Drafthouse, etc. Merchandise of the latter collaboration include: Limited edition lunchbox and thermos set, enamel pins, shirts, stationery, access to a “Barbie Blowout Party’’ or “Barbie Slumber Party Screening’’ where a themed pink cocktail will be available for purchase — all while supplies last! While their marketing team devises the chicest lure for Barbiecore crowds, Alamo Drafthouse executives are embroiled in yet another union-busting controversy over the dissolution of their projectionist role for a more vague “technical engineer” role. Bottom line: this means more responsibilities for workers who were already seeking better conditions through organizing. The spectacle of brand movies more often than not sits atop worker exploitation; consider the child laborers of Frito-Lay and Nike factories. Perhaps their stories are less toyetic.
By the time Barbie is released we will have heard canned testimonies from every actor to the work’s genius. We will have seen them react to receiving dolls made in their image. We will have toured the Barbie Dreamhouse with Barbie herself. We will have passively pored over every aesthetic element of the film just by going about daily lives, unwittingly pursued by the omnipresent bright pink “B”. There is no conceivable way for this film to fail. Already film bloggers and commentators have taken to every corner of the internet singing its praises, asking that someone “Send [them] to Barbie Land immediately!” Much of the work of interpretation will have occurred before the film is even released because we have already collectively considered the film-product enough (scrolling on Twitter, consuming teaser images & clips) to justify claims of its originality and depth without having watched the film.
Media criticism often puts form at odds with content, questioning how the two inform each other, if one takes precedence over the other, if there is unity or contrast etc. The content refers to the ideological matter of a piece of media while the form popularly refers to aesthetic presentation (cinematography, mise en scène, editing etc.) Evaluations of form should include the promotional superstructure — the physical and digital ads, trailers, memes, social media hype, actor/character appearances, brand collaborations. Each additional image contributes to the scale of this collective perception so that before we even see the film its content has been subjugated by its form. The prevalence and scheduled saturation of these images establishes their consumption as ritual. The form is thus the negotiation of an identity, and all the images which comprise it add a sense of validity; they offer shortcuts to build our own identities through association with the cumulative image. One picture at the Barbie screening sleepover, a Barbie thermos to sip from on a zoom call, the use of pink (#E0218A) in any context, blondness, things to help us communicate ideal femininity and inhabit the happy nostalgia-bound reality built and approved by those with access to the means of production.
If we accept this expansive definition of form it necessarily includes audience generated images and publicized reactions as they all contribute to the collective perception of the media product. Herein lies potential for agency. As it stands, Barbie is one of the most internationally recognizable characters, whose visibility has likely compounded with each generation. When it becomes impossible to disengage with the object, disruptive engagement is the greatest source of both critical spectatorship and joyful interaction. Audiences can cyberbully Paramount into redesigning Sonic into oblivion, and call attention to the absurdity and insecurity of such endeavors. They can transform the vast stretches of pre-release hype, appropriating and recontextualizing the promotional imagery we are fed. Audiences can also reject the comfort of Hollywood by consciously consuming media created and exhibited in alternative (non-industry) spaces. Avoiding branded blockbusters altogether is unrealistic, however attendance must be maintained as conscious choice and participation must be critical.
When we do (finally) enter darkened theaters and mass migrate to Barbie land, Barbie will also take a journey out of her world and into ours: a simulated version of the “real world.” If we internalize Barbie’s self-discovery arch, we might also reflect on our own complacency in the broader systems which brought her to life. We can also step out of the toybox.
WHERE NEXT, BARBIE?
There need not be a cohesive conspiratorial agenda for industry consolidation and recycling of IP — many investors and audiences alike want something familiar and safe. Just as superhero films dominated box offices for the past decade, the brand film is the current risk averse box office lure, which may be more than a passing trend if the new Mattel Cinematic Universe gains its footing. Success of the IP resuscitation project would mean the generalized devaluation of storytelling as a reflection of real lives, the dilution of signifiers as they are reused in a matrix of superficial associations, and an inability for future generations to conceive of culture and social relationships outside of corporate symbology. The brand genre’s supplantation of mainstream film is the logical consequence of a universalized promotional superstructure. Rather than the “one for them, one for me” filmmaker philosophy in which corporate gigs fund passion projects, approaches like that of Disney and Mattel seek to appropriate the mystique of the “passion project” by doing away with the distinction entirely. Every film with significant financial backing will be one for them, and yesterday’s fresh talent will be inducted into the corporate ranks. In an interview with The New Yorker, Kevin McKeon of Mattel’s film division stated “Our top priority is to make really good movies — movies that matter, and that make a cultural footprint. Our second priority is to make sure that we do no disservice to the brands.” With each film the imaginative space for young viewers and hopeful artists is narrowed by the merchandise they can nag their parents to buy.
The concepts for industry films and TV shows will continue to be simply that — shells for nostalgia, irony, and product placement. We will be surprised insofar as the rehashed IP is absurd. The audience is insured with a comfort policy, the way forward is through the confrontation of discomfort, ungovernable spectatorship.
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