10 Huge Movies That Are Secretly Car Commercials

We all like to think of moviemaking as an “art for art’s sake” kind of pursuit, but in reality, film production exists in a tightly interconnected relationship with commercial advertising. Whether we’ve noticed it or not, we’ve all been influenced by subtle and not-so-subtle product placement, likely in some of our favorite movies — at least the ones that take place on Earth. It’s all the result of the behind-the-scenes deals that allow production companies to shell out millions of dollars to film their blockbusters, and, for Hollywood’s biggest movies, a lot of that money comes from car manufacturers.

In the sorts of movies where cars are particularly noticeable, we tend to notice them when the cars are themselves “characters,” like the truck from Duel, or Mad Max’s Interceptor, or the sleek Chevy Malibu in Drive. That’s fun and all, but what if, and bear with us here, the cars in these movies could instead double as ads for cars themselves? Thus, automotive product placement is born. Cue the requisite 20 minutes of explosive Bayhem car chases made up almost entirely of logos.

Movie product placement is not going away anytime soon, and car product placement in particular has proved many times to be just as lucrative for the movies as it is for the manufacturers. What better way to relive the thrill of whatever high-octane blockbuster you just saw than heading straight to your local dealership and buying your favorite character’s car? Because this type of advertisement is never particularly subtle, we’ve collected ten of the most obvious examples of movies transforming themselves into car commercials to remind us where those hundreds of millions of Avengers money came from.