How Hollywood Studios are Using Footballers to Sell Their Big Movies

Why do those terrible Wayne Rooney film trailers exist?

By now, you’ve almost definitely seen the various terrible videos for 20th Century Fox movies featuring Manchester United players. The football team and the film studio have signed a deal to promote Fox’s 2016 output, and while the partnership involves several different elements, what’s grabbed the most attention has been the specially made trailers featuring United players interacting with characters from upcoming films. The latest video is a trailer for Independence Day: Resurgence, with Wayne Rooney, Juan Mata, Daily Blind, Chris Smalling and Ashley Young moonlighting as fighter pilots taking down the alien invaders. It follows an X-Men: Apocalypse clip, with Professor X recruiting Rooney to the team, and a Deadpool one, with Ryan Reynolds’ anti-hero dreaming of scoring a penalty for United. All three are absolutely god-awful — not just bad, but spectacularly, bafflingly bad, the sort of thing makes you wonder how the hell they ever got approved and made. But I think that’s completely deliberate, and what makes them so effective. 

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It’s important to not overstate how embarrassing these things are. The first Deadpool one was probably the least bad, because at least Deadpool is meant to be a fourth-wall breaking character and the film already had some pretty unique marketing. But then the X-Men one dropped, and a nation withered in second-hand shame. James McAvoy is using Cerebro to track down new mutants. There’s some awkwardly-inserted old footage of David de Gea and Anthony Martial, and you just think, aw, it’s cute, Hollywood is acknowledging soccer. And then Wayne appears. Wayne Rooney actually starts talking to Professor X, and when you realise how far they’ve gone with this you physically recoil. “Hello Charles!” he says, like an annoyingly precocious eight-year old in a school play. “I’ll do anything for the team!”. How much can so much money be spent on something so bad?

Yet somehow, this new Independence Day one is so much worse. Partly it’s because they’ve managed to rope in another four United players, making four times more awkward. Chris Smalling barks all his dialogue — including a boast about how many Community Shields they’ve won, ffs — with his eyes rigidly forward and terrifyingly fierce concentration that makes him resemble Moss from The I.T. Crowd. There’s the hollow inhumanness to the whole thing that only can only come from Jeff Goldblum clearly being in a different continent when he recorded his lines. There’s terrible banter about pronouncing Daily Blind’s name wrong, and you can see him die a tiny bit every time it’s repeated. Ashley Young must have been so bad that they don’t even let him say anything (Juan Mata does have a big smile on his face at the end tho).

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These have been part of a wider trend of Hollywood studios trying to get the most out of two things: the increasing importance of the box office outside of America; and their realisation that the rest of the world loves football (and its increasing popularity in the US). Thus we’ve getting football-based promos designed to directly target the UK. Things like Kevin Hart taking penalties against Joe Hart to promote Ride Along 2, and this woeful Suicide Squad video (released on the same day as the England Euro 2016 squad) where an anonymous pundit strenuously trying to squeeze Deadshot and Harley Quinn into a 4-5-1 formation. Summer tournaments have long been a thorn in film studios’ side, meaning that everyone outside of North America won’t go to the cinema for a few weeks in the middle of the prime blockbuster season. But this new approach all feels pretty beggy and cringey —like some American going “Hey, you limey’s like soccerball? We’ll we’ve got some fresh hot Will Smith soccerball for you right here!” It’s what USA Soccer Guy would do, if he had the budget.

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But Man United’s collab is something bigger than this. Something better. Something cleverer. Everyone thinks these trailers are awful. But we’re all talking about them. We’re all tagging each other in them on Facebook, and laughing at Rooney’s acting. But they’re getting us to watch.  Crucially, these are for big films (X-Men and Independence Day) that people were already excited about. They’re selling the films. It doesn’t matter if Wayne Rooney and Manchester United end up looking stupid. Fox doesn’t care about that. We might think we’re playing Fox by laughing at their stupid adverts, but they’re really still getting their messaging through. In the words of DJ Khaled: Congratulations, you just played yourself.

(Plus, we’re still excited about what other awful crossovers the Man Utd x 20th Century Fox  partnership will throw up. Check out what else they’ve got coming out this year. Rooney going back in time for Assassin’s Creed? A CGI Marcus Rashford in Ice Age? Marouane Fellaini with Troll  hair? Let’s just pray Jose in some of them.)

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