Posted in: Movies | Tagged: ant man, entertainment, film, marvel, peyton reed, The Cure, Thomas The Train

How Story Drove Product Placement In Ant-Man

Published Sat, 25 Jul 2015 15:15:01 -0500

Product placement has become the norm in films and television now. Captain America working in the Apple Store in Winter Soldier or Agent Peter Burke touting the features of his car in White Collar feel like little mini-ads in the middle of the story. But in the case of the latest Marvel film, Ant-Man, some of the biggest product placements were driven by story, not money.

In an interview with Film School Rejects, Ant-Man director Peyton Reed talked about two of the most memorable moments in the film… Thomas the Train and the brief case battle… and how the jokes lead to having the products in the scene and not the other way around. First he talks about getting Thomas and what they were not allowed to do with the train.

I believe in Edgar [Wright] and Joe Cornish's original drafts it was a train set. At some point in the process that predated my involvement it became Thomas. As I came on, they had not secured the rights to Thomas. We had to do this whole thing where we did this presentation for the people who own the rights to Thomas. Thank God they agreed and found it funny, but there were definite stipulations. For example, nobody could be tied to the tracks and run over by Thomas. Thomas couldn't be doing anything that could be perceived by children as evil Thomas. Thomas had to stay neutral in the battle, which was always our intention. Like anybody, they're protective of their brand. I didn't know what we were going to do if we didn't get the rights to that. There are certain things I was going to be devastated about if we couldn't have them. Thomas was one, because… you could do any kind of toy train, but the personality of that thing and the eyes moving back and forth give it a whole vibe and took it to another level.

And then the brief case battle. Now the iPhone part may have been product placement, but choosing the song for the scene was not.

In the briefcase battle, we knew we wanted to have an iPhone joke. We had all these different versions of jokes, like, Yellow Jacket saying, 'You're going to end up dead!' and then you'd hear 'Searching for the nearest Panera Bread.' There were some funny jokes and some not-so-funny jokes, but, at the end of the day, they were just jokes. What if he activated the music feature? What would it be? I'm a massive Cure fan. We came up with a bunch of things, but we thought we could find a joke for 'disintegration.' The first song on Disinigration, which is the second CD I ever bought, was 'Plainsong'. It's such an epic song that it transcended the joke — scoring this whole battle in a briefcase. There was this weird, cold wave goth vibe, changing the character of that action scene. You have all these action scenes you want to have a different flavor. Then it became a question of, 'Will [The Cure frontman] Robert Smith let us use his music?' He ended up loving it, so he did.

As those are two of the strongest laughs I heard in the theater both times I saw the film, I think Reed made the right call.

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