By Drew Dietsch
| Published
Last year, I saw this Super Bowl commercial for the failed video game Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. It was your standard fare: celebrities centered for comedic effect in an attempt to shill something soulless. But while I was watching it, I thought, “This is creatively on par with plenty of actual movies these days.”
That led me to start using the term “ad movie” when describing certain projects on the horizon. With the overwhelming success of A Minecraft Movie and some recent casting news I’ll dig into later, I think it’s time to accept that pop culture has embraced the ad movie in full and we’re all the poorer for it.
Defining the Ad Movie
Before we can analyze this phenomenon, we should give “ad movie” a proper definition. I’m sure such a simple label can be applied in any number of ways by anyone who wants to use it, but I want to give it some specificity for my argument.
First off, an ad movie is a production where there is a definable and forward-facing brand at the core of the movie’s reason for existence. That seems widely applicable to any established property that gets a movie, so let’s drill it down into something more concrete: an ad movie is a film where the property being shilled takes precedence over a strong creative reason for the project existing.
So, while Superman is undeniably a mascot for the DC brand, the new James Gunn movie looks to have a lot more on its mind than just printing t-shirts or selling comic books.
That’s another facet that should define the ad movie: the film exists to filter viewers to another centralized medium of the brand, therefore acting as an advertisement for another product. This is why so many video game movies are doomed to come off as ad movies. It’s why it’s rare to see video game movie adaptations that make strong enough arguments for their existence as cinematic narrative experiences. They are not actually meant to be that. They are supposed to act as an impetus for you to play (read: buy) the game. This isn’t limited to video game movies – I’ll be shocked if Matchbox doesn’t fit the ad movie bill – but they face the toughest uphill battle with ad movie issues because they are baked in to the very nature of that kind of adaptation.
The last bit of definition is a murky one that I don’t feel completely married to, but given that the Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is the thing that set me down this path, I think ad movies in this context should only apply to live-action features. Naturally, you can lob worthy ad movie accusations at The Super Mario Bros. Movie or The Angry Birds Movie, but the art of animation itself is such a different medium for expressing ideas and one that is unavoidably more artful by its mere nature of being “drawn.”
In my book, ad movies are flicks that come off as extended Super Bowl commercials: comedically focused, celebrity loaded, and filmed in live-action for maximum human presence in the most inhuman artistic endeavor possible, an ad. Think Borderlands and now you’re getting it.
The Rise and Rise of the Ad Movie
With our definition in writing for everyone to argue about, it’s time to see exactly why we’ve embraced the ad movie as a culture. While there have been plenty of ad-focused films and productions over the years, the ad movie doesn’t really hit peak saturation until Barbie.
Now, to be clear, Barbie does have all the features of an ad movie, but like most things in Hollywood, it’s the exception to the rule that everyone wants to copy. But, they do so by doing everything wrong that Barbie did right. Barbie is intrinsically an ad movie but it finds plenty of worthwhile creative and thematic reasons for existing, even if it never fully sheds its ad movie nature.
But, it made all the money so it’s going to be a template moving forward for studios. Which leads us to another massive success and the biggest case for the ad movie definition: A Minecraft Movie. I’m not here to debate the perceived quality of that flick, but I will say that welcoming it into serious film discussion points towards how we’ve become more and more accepting of feature-length commercials as legitimate cinema about the human condition.
Buy the New Street Fighter™ Game After You See the New Street Fighter™ Movie
Which brings me to the recent casting news about Street Fighter. With every new bit of info that comes out, it becomes clearer and clearer that this new attempt at a movie version of the iconic fighting game is heading down the ad movie path and skipping with glee along the way. If you told me 50 Cent, Roman Reigns, Orville Peck, David Dastmalchian, and A Minecraft Movie’s own Jason Momoa were respectively cast as Balrog, Akuma, Vega, M. Bison, and Blanka, I’d assume it was for a Super Bowl commercial for the new video game.
Because that is what Street Fighter will likely end up being at the end of the day. It doesn’t sound like a project coming from a creative voice telling a story that needs to be told. It’s just another product that hopes to snag more people into its brand.
Advertising and marketing are an unavoidable evil in a world where art must be filtered through capitalism, but the hope is always that artists are able to push something through the system that makes a case as more than just Content or Product. Maybe Street Fighter will surprise and illuminate something profound about humanity. Anything is possible!
But if the reaction to Street Fighter’s stunt casting is any indication, people seemed really excited for a two-hour Super Bowl commercial. I guess that’s the future we’ve decided to hook our cultural wagon on. For all the complaints I see about things like AMC warning customers about excessive advertisements before the feature presentation, that same audience sure seems to line up around the block to watch the new ad movie.
Are we about to see a world where Bratz gets reappraised as a misunderstood masterpiece?
