I ask because I’ve never seen a more unbelievably blatant product placement in a movie. In the upcoming comedy shitpile “Zookeeper,” Kevin Something, the guy from “King of Queens,” plays a zookeeper who has the animals talk to him.
The movie looks incredibly horrible, but what’s fascination about it is how prominently TGI Friday’s is in the commercial. Fully 25 to 30 percent of the 30-second commercial is devoted to the gag of the zoo’s gorilla really wanting to go to TGI Friday’s. The gorilla - remember, this is all in the 30-second TV spot - asks Kevin Whatshisname something to the effect of “is TGI Friday’s as unbelievably awesome as I’ve heard” and Kevin LAstname says “oh, yeah, big time” and Kevin Whatever later takes the gorilla (dressed as a human) to TGI Friday’s.
TGI Friday’s has paid for product placement before - they’re rather blatantly paying for mention in “Click” - but in this case they obviously paid a HELL of a lot of money to get into the trailer. I’m sure TGI Friday’s serves a generic meal as well as most mid-priced chains, but I can’t believe that it is such a beloved trade name in American popular culture that the moviemakers would think that such extensive use of the name in the trailer was to their marketing advantage. In the ad, TGI Friday’s quite literally is more prominent than any of the human supporting actors. So obvoiusly, TGI Friday’s not only paid a shit-ton of cadsh for the placement, but paid extra specifically to have the trailers structured around their part in the movie.
Much as I like to see movies about Boston, few of them are filmed here, and for some reason, they get Boston zoos wrong. Altered States, which was obviously not filmed in Boston, features a rhinoceros and an antelope herd in the Zoo. Right. This new Zookeeper shows an Elephant and other animals that aren’t actually in the Boston zoo. I’m curious to se tye film just to see how far it diverges from reality.
as for the Friday’s, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did essentially pay for a feature-length ad. MacDonald’s did this with an ET clone called Mac and Me back in the late 80s. It was obviously a MacDonald’s ad from the get-go, and flopped. And never shows up even on late-night cable.
But seriously, are you sure it wasn’t a joint TGIF-Zookeeper ad? Sometimes they combine ads for free publicity. “Eat at Fridays and enjoy the Zookeeper coming to theaters this summer!” I’ve seen these type of ads a lot.
Nope, I’ve seen the trailer he’s talking about. It’s not a joint ad. From what I’ve seen, there’s lots of different tv trailers for this movie, but the one consistent thing is that the TGI Friday’s scene is in ALL of them.
Holy shit. When they referred to this in the most recent South Park, I assumed it was a joke, à la “Rob Schneider is… THE STAPLER!” I had no idea it was a real movie.
I watched a trailer last night. It’s about as bad as The Stapler, and even for Kevin James it’s a new low. It’s mindless, edgeless silly romcom Doolittle-wannabe pap, to say nothing of the blatant TGI Fridays plugs.
And dammit if I didn’t still chuckle at some of the bits in the trailer.
You’ve been whooshed. The point is that having the animal nearly choke on Red Bull makes the product look bad. Therefore, it might be that a competitor, which, in this case is Coca-Cola, paid for that to happen.