How To Promote A Movie Without Really Dying
The recent Balloon Boy stunt would have made a fantastic Disney movie, right up to the part where young Falcon fell out of the balloon and smeared himself all over the Colarado landscape. Even the kid’s name sounds pre-processed for animated adaptation, although it would have to be marked as “Based On A Largely Untrue Story”, since it was all later debunked.
Coincidentally, Disney have just released the movie ‘Up’, in which a young boy takes to the sky using balloons and flies around a bit. (Accompanied by an old man, but anyway…) Sound familiar?
Well, far be it from me to suggest that the boys’ father just wanted Disney to let him on some dubious reality show in exchange for the free promotion. I’m sure he did it out of the goodness of his heart, in case the mega-mouse-corp didn’t have the money to plug its own movie.
If you read this and decide you too want to fake-endanger yourself and/or your family, in order to promote someone else’s film, how would you go about it? Here are some suggestions…
Saw VI
Now on its fifth sequel, the torture-porn -choose-your-own-amputation saga probably doesn’t need help from the population to make inexplicable amounts of money. But, if you want to give them a hand anyway, you could always send a child off to the woods with an adult friend to “play a game”.
The game should probably resemble hide and seek, rather than forcing them to crawl through barbed wire whilst encased in an iron maiden. And you should then ‘forget’ you arranged this and report them missing, announcing it on Twitter long before you alert the authorities. If you’re very sincere, you might just avoid arrest.
Fantastic Mr Fox
For this, you just need to get foxes into the news. The obvious way would be to unleash an armada of them onto a nearby farm or council estate, where they would run riot, eating chickens and rooting through the rubbish until there was hardly a wheelie bin left vertical.
But, you may not have any foxes to hand. So, just tell people you saw your young child being dragged into the woods by one of the little ginger George Clooneys. Then, once every fox in the area has been executed, admit you may have been mistaken and it was probably a family dog. (You’ll need a dog, or some other animal that could pass for a fox. A goat might do at a push.)
Zombieland
Faking a zombie attack is never easy. Even if you were to lumber down the street, clad in ripped clothing and dripping with tomato ketchup, you’d probably be mistaken for a rubbish performance artist. Luckily, the following strategy should ensure non-ambiguity:
- Become unshaven, wear slightly tatty (but not homeless-looking) clothes, maybe pale yourself up with some make-up. It might be beneficial if you can’t be recognised.
- Find a cinema that is showing Zombieland.
- During a busy period, wander into the foyer looking slightly dazed.
- Find an unsuspecting punter and bite them.
- Run.
The author cannot be held responsible for any arrests, verbal abuse or entirely deserved beatings sustained as a result of following the above advice.