Seeing an international trailer for a Hollywood-made blockbuster can be an unexpectedly illuminating experience. Taking note of what elements get subtracted or added when appealing to a global audience speaks volumes about what studios and ad executives think will play across the Atlantic and Pacific. For instance, when advertising a mega-budgeted action assault, it’s best to frontload the universal: and in the instance of Transformers: The Last Knight, the cultural-divide spanning material happens to be the “comedy” of an alien robot dinosaur spitting out a chewed-up car covered in viscous green slime.
Transformers and the Super Bowl are a match made in heaven. Is the NFL’s biggest night not, in its own way, the Michael Bay of televised sporting events? Massive budget, fetish for pyrotechnics, close-up shots of muscle-bound men glistening with hard-earned sweat, oodles of American patriotism, very few women, an overall roiling undercurrent of homoerotic tension — when the new TV spot for Transformers: The Last Knight runs on Sunday night during the big game, it’ll be difficult to tell where the football ends and the gigantic alien robot battles begin.
With everyone obsessed with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, very few people noticed the other huge hit of December: the Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg comedy Daddy’s Home. Very quietly, this film about the rivalry between a square stepdad (Ferrell) and a supercool biological father (Wahlberg) grossed more than $150 million in the U.S. and $240 million worldwide. The movie made $70 million more than The Other Guys, the first film that paired Ferrell and Wahlberg together as mismatched buddies, and it was Ferrell’s biggest comedy since Elf back in 2003. Daddy’s Home was a bigger success than the first Anchorman or Talladega Nights (or any Adam McKay / Will Ferrell movie, for that matter).
Will Ferrell is at his best when he’s at his most outrageous. Give me Mugatu tossing hot coffee in his assistant’s face, a giddy adult elf, or a chubby ‘70s band mate banging the cowbell. But as a straight-laced, jazz-loving stepfather? No thanks.
After earning huge laughs with their whiskey-and-water dynamic in 2010's The Other Guys, Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell reteam for a comedy that puts a hilarious spin on the emotional fallout of divorce.
After a new interview with Men’s Journal, Mark Wahlberg is under fire for perhaps taking his own image as an action star a bit too seriously.