'Pepsi clearly cut a fat check to producers of "Madame Web" and it shows.'
Posted by
mud
Feb 22 '24, 11:28
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HOT TAKES
‘Madame Web’ Is One Huge, Terrible Pepsi Commercial. Why?
PRODUCT PLACEMENT
The soda company clearly cut a fat check to producers of the maligned film, and it shows. It also—and this is a high bar—just may be the silliest aspect of the movie.
Allegra Frank
Deputy Entertainment Editor
I am an avowed Pepsi hater. It tastes gross. Coke is better. No, I will not be taking further questions.
But somehow, this Pepsi hater saw Madame Web at a theater so deep in the pocket of Big Pepsi that it not only exclusively served the foul drink, but the Pepsi logo was on the walls of the auditorium. And, reader, I’m glad this is where I screened the film—because this is the optimal way to watch this suboptimal superhero film, which practically screams “sponsored by Pepsi.” Kendall Jenner should send Sony a fruit basket, because Madame Web may have usurped her deeply offensive commercial for the title of “Worst Pepsi Ad of All Time.”
Madame Web is ostensibly the Y2K-era origin story of a clairvoyant superhero (Dakota Johnson), whose emergent powers were bestowed upon her in-utero by magic Amazonian arachnids. (You see, her mom was in the Amazon researching spiders right before she died…) But equally important as Cassie Webb’s journey toward understanding why she can now occasionally see an indeterminate amount of time into the future is Pepsi’s role in that journey.
(Warning: Spoilers for Madame Web below.)
The soda’s iconography spills out through the movie, like a fountain machine depositing Pepsi into a Pepsi-branded cup. The camera regularly pans over the gigantic Pepsi-Cola factory sign in Long Island City as an establishing shot; this is Pepsi-Cola’s Queens, baby. When Cassie asks her best friend/fellow paramedic Ben Parker (Adam Scott, implicitly playing that Ben Parker) for a beer at a barbecue, he insists she drink a Pepsi instead. That’s a much safer choice, he says, since she recently suffered a heart attack—and also because Pepsi is funding the entire movie.
Published Feb. 22, 2024 1:44PM EST
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