📽️ Theater ads are depressing, but Deadpool was good

How Nike, Amazon, and Speak No Evil nearly ruined a wonderful experience

I don’t watch much in the way of television or movies these days, and neither does my husband. Between the two of us, we manage a few hours a week of Stardew Valley in the evenings, and that’s about it. We prioritize family meals and housework and reading books and long walks on Saturday mornings, which is nice. But we both enjoy Ryan Reynolds movies, and the occasion of our daughter’s first birthday seemed like a good opportunity to sneak in a date. After we finished up with the pediatrician appointment — timed awkwardly enough that we both ended up taking the day mostly off work — we had lunch with a friend, left the baby at home, and went to the theater to see Deadpool vs. Wolverine.

The movie itself was great, and our local theater is a good one — comfy seats, clean floors, pleasant patrons. But the ads nearly ruined the experience.

I don’t mean ads for Deadpool, either — Ryan Reynolds knows what he’s doing with that sort of thing, and besides, somehow we’d both managed to avoid any spoilers. I’d learned about it from a Doritos package at my local grocery store. Not a lot of room there for a lengthy pitch. I walked into the theater knowing basically nothing about the movie beyond the fact that it starred Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.

No, the problem was that we got to the theater early enough to sit through some of the advertisements in addition to the previews. The early ones have always been sort of lame; weird games, beverage ads, “your ad here” type stuff. There were also a lot more government ads than I remembered ever seeing; not just the flashy cinematic military recruitment ones aimed at teens, but ads for in-state HBCUs and the government office you’re supposed to contact if you run afoul of housing discrimination. Not exactly feel-good content, but whatever.

Then came the Nike ad

I spent the first 90% of pretty convinced signalled the switched to previews — I genuinely thought it was setting up a new Joker movie. It was a montage of various sports scenes with a sociopathic overtone reminiscent of Hannibal or Dexter. It was evidently supposed to be ‘a representation of Olympians' inner monologue as they excel’ and ‘celebrate what it takes to be a winner,’ but my goodness, maybe having the voice of the Green Goblin saying stuff like

“I’m irrational, I have zero remorse, I have no sense of compassion… I'm single-minded. I'm deceptive. I'm obsessive. I'm selfish… I'm delusional. I'm maniacal. You think I'm a bad person? Tell me.”

for 90 seconds, followed by a Nike logo… immediately before a superhero movie, in order to sell shoes and other athletic clothing is a bad idea?

The kicker for me was that when I went to search up the advertisement, I searched “serial killer voice Nike ad” and the guts of the internet served me an entirely different slasher movie parody ad from the 2000 version of Nike, which was so upsetting it got pulled from the Olympics. This “am I a bad person” ad is supposed to be Nike’s comeback moment or something — back to their gritty controversial roots! — and sure, I guess I’m talking about it, but most of what I’m got out of it was a visceral sense of what it feels like to watch a trainwreck.

To wit, I came across this LinkedIn post absolutely decimating the C-suite self-inflicted stupidity on Nike’s part. Apparently, Nike got rid of a bunch of their traditional categories and decided to focus solely on direct-to-consumer sales, which not only pissed off long-time partners and torched departments worth of expertise, it cratered brand loyalty and market share. Nike’s got enough long-standing reputation and financial value to hang on, but “an epic saga of value destruction” feels pretty accurate to me.

I am so incredibly over “the bad guys are the good guys, actually” — which brings me to

the preview for Wicked, the movie.

I remember when Wicked first came out; before Maleficent, before The Suicide Squad, before the gritty superhero trend. My best friend in high school absolutely loved the book, though somehow I never got around to reading it. A lot of people I know consider the musical among their absolute favorites, and I was primed to be excited because I just finished reading the first few books of Oz with my son. The visuals looked great, sort of a mix between Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and the Capitol scenes from The Hunger Games. But honestly, I found the trailer off-putting and it mostly made me want to go watch Legally Blonde again, because I’m getting tired of ‘pink femininity’ being code for ‘villanous bully.’ Elle Woods was delightfully subversive in her relationships with the women around her — in the sense that everyone expected her to be a dumb blonde jealous of her ex-boyfriend’s ‘serious brunette’ replacement girl, and instead Elle and Vivian become friends.

These days I’m all about movies that are, if not wholesome, at least have an underlying message that basically aligns with what I want to see in the world, what would feel good to fill my brain with. Wicked was cool back when it was subversive, when its message was “there are consequences for messing with nerds” or whatever. In a world saturated with Dolores Umbridge, Mean Girls and Effie Trinket, “pretty girls in pink are oblivious and cruel” is no longer subversive¹. “You have to be a sociopath to succeed, so buy our shoes” is not a message I want to see in the world.

The Amazon advertisement was a similar miss for me

…not because it was sociopathic, but because it was depressing.

Amazon is convenient, and that’s a fact. But when the plot of your ad is “pretty young woman moves to a new city, watches TV alone in her empty apartment, gets inspired by the decor on the show and obsessively buys plants off of Amazon, then drinks coffee on her balcony — which represents the only green space visible,” it doesn’t strike me as inspiring.

They could have had a dude in it — it could have been about a young couple starting a new life together, being happy and too busy doing something else to run out and get plants… but no, they're advertising to lonely women in big cities as their target audience. The ad’s protagonist might as well have ordered ten cats, plus litter and food, off of Amazon.

To be clear, I’m not dunking on anyone who moves to a big city and is too worn out or nervous to go out and explore the town at first, and I’m not dunking on single people or city dwellers or cat owners or whatever — certainly if she were a real person I might have admired her green thumb and taste, and certainly I have owned cats and been single. Many of my friends spent big chunks of their lives in big cities. I’ve even bought plants off of Amazon to cheer up a space! I still have the little succulents in little owl pots I bought for the first classroom I ever had that actually sported windows.

But advertisements speak to culture, they are meant to resonate with a large audience with disposable income, to inspire them to spend money. If a huge number of American women are moving into small, lonely apartments in big cities so they can watch TV alone and pretend they’re enjoying nature by filling their space with houseplants, oof. Where are the roommates? The trips to the bodega? The street sellers of exotic fruit and plants and artwork? The buskers, the rats stealing pizza slices, the profusion of life that represents the whole point of moving to a city.

I hate the idea that there are so many people in the situation of trying to brighten up a lonely, empty apartment, without help from friends or family or even chance-met strangers, that this ad seemed like a good idea.

It wasn’t the worst buzzkill of the experience, though. That distinction is reserved for

the Speak No Evil preview

James McAvoy (Charles Xavier himself!) as perpetrator of a psychological nightmare was not just a tone-deaf addition to the pre-Deadpool lineup, it came near to ruining the whole experience for me. Ever since my first pregnancy, it’s been a lot harder for me to tolerate imagery involving violence against kids. I’m also just a lot more aware of my own vulnerability, now that I’ve experienced so many postpartum complications; sexualized violence against vulnerable women is more existentially disturbing than it used to be.

I don’t understand why it needs to be said, but here it is: Don’t show me existential horrors before a comedy flick!

Sure, Deadpool is inherently R-rated, and gory, and has loving odes to wanton destruction and sexualized, violent humor. But it’s not threatening, it’s tongue-in-cheek.

Speak No Evil is horror in the deeply disturbing sense, the ‘this could maybe happen to you’ sense — not the ‘zombie apocalypse that inspires you to debate what kind of gun explodes a corpse head best’ sense. Genuine nightmare fuel, not jump scares and silly costumes.

The premise, which I gleaned entirely from the preview because I have no desire to learn more about it from a search engine, is essentially that nice family A meets nice family B on vacation in Europe, gets invited back to their beautiful rural home, then discovers that family B is not just sort of weirdly pushy about norms but actively evil, with creepy dad going in for creepy neck kisses on another man’s wife, with close-up shots of an 8-year-old boy with his tongue cut out, with a weedy dweeby husband totally out of his depth when it comes to getting his family to safety once the phone lines are cut and his tires are slashed.

Absolutely nothing about watching a woman about my age desperately trying to keep a terrifying abuser away from herself and her kids put me in the mood to enjoy Deadpool. I used to think of ads as a bit of a waste of time, and looked forward to the previews. They were a nice chance to decide what to see the next time we’ve got a chance. Now? I plan to carefully avoid all of it — or just skip the theater entirely and watch good movies ad-free, cheaper and from the comfort of my own home.

Deadpool and Wolverine was a genuinely good movie, tho

On the whole I’m glad we went. It was good to get out of the house, away from the baby and chores, and have a laugh. Deadpool and Wolverine certainly didn’t blow my mind, and it won’t be a movie that sticks with me forever, but days later I have no particular complaints and despite the ads I left the theater in a great mood. The nostalgia-bait was well-done, the moral at the end was reasonably wholesome, the action sequences were fun, and it was cool to see how Ryan Reynolds involved his family in the film.

It felt like a good entry in the Deadpool series and any niggling criticisms I might have about it feel nitpicky given that it’s a Deadpool movie and not really meant to be taken seriously. I don’t see much point in reviewing the plot, or the acting, or the dialog, or whatever — it’s a Deadpool movie, you get what you expect… though I will say that haven’t enjoyed a soundtrack this much since Guardians of the Galaxy.

I just wish Nike, Amazon, and Speak No Evil hadn’t tainted the experience for me.

1. Remember when Sandy Olsson from Grease was the quintessential good girl? Feels like a modern Hollywood version would do its darndest to turn her into the villain of a remake with all of Rizzo’s mistakes presented as virtues.