Tesco goes to Trolleywood http://bit.ly/c068cD
One step beyond branded media – custom movies! Content for one store only – harkens back to the early days of cinema where the studios also owned the cinemas. Kraft and P&G have jumped into the music business, so it’s only logical that Tesco will jump into the movie business. (Really, that’s logical?)
The supermarket giant that inhabits virtually every corner of our existence has this year moved into film-making with a straight-to-DVD movie or, as its makers prefer, a “DVD Premiere”. This autumn, Paris Connections will go on sale exclusively in Tesco stores. If successful, it could revolutionise the movie business, removing distributors and agents in one swipe and transforming how many films are made and funded.
Paris Connections is the first in a series of Collins adaptations, loosely based on her novel LA Connections, but transposed to Paris Fashion week. Today, in the Hotel Lutetia, the director Harley Cokeliss is shooting a catwalk scene. Many of the extras are authentic fashionistas: a man with wet-look leather trousers, plenty of big glasses and vertiginous heels. The effect is tarnished somewhat when I am hurriedly shepherded among them to make up the numbers.
Right now it’s just one movie, but it does indicate that there is a way around the stranglehold on production by the MPAA studios. Unlike those studios, Tesco didn’t intervene to micromanage the movie asking just “that it not be porn” and be PG15.
No matter how bad the movie, actors, directors, producers and the whole product crew got paid!