Seinfeld's 'Unfrosted' and Hollywood's Cynical Corporate Cinematic Universe
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Brand biopics attacked in 2023. Tetris, Air, BlackBerry, Flamin’ Hot and The Beanie Bubble arrived monthly through the summer, with Ferrari waiting for nobody in December. Now comes Unfrosted, Jerry Seinfeld’s terrible Pop-Tarts creation myth. Sony’s working on a Coke vs. Pepsi Cola Wars movie. I pray A24 lets Darren Aronofsky make his Elon Musk project all about the Cybertruck.
What is this miserable trend? Why is this happening now? Does anyone really care? Ben Affleck’s all-star Nike Air Jordan picture, the biggest hit, earned less than a movie about Australian kids talking to a hand. BlackBerry — the best, because it’s the only good one — still sold about as many tickets last year as BlackBerry sold new BlackBerrys.
Unfrosted feels made for anyone who wished Barbie was only Will Ferrell at Mattel HQ. (We could hook Barbie into this conversation, but only that splendid fantasy’s worst scenes, which wedged in a ghost cameo for the toy’s creator.)
Seinfeld leads a big-name comedy ensemble in his retelling of how Kellogg’s made a “shelf-stable heatable fruit pastry breakfast product.” There is living mutant ravioli, a milkman mafia and cereal mascots re-enacting January 6th in 1963 Michigan. Frustratingly, this cartoonishness does not make Unfrosted different enough from its predecessors. Khrushchev shows up? Gorbachev was already in Tetris.
That game-biz thriller was flagrant enough to add a car chase to history. Other movies prefer the all-caps mode of biopic dramedy: Bad wigs, loud performances, needle-drop montages that aim for Martin Scorsese but sink to Adam McKay. When Seinfeld films a Pop-Tart heating in a toaster like a NASA launch, it’s the same mock-religious awe other directors use when their protagonists gaze at the Air Jordan, a Game Boy, the first spicy Cheeto and an overturned Beanie Baby truck.
Something stinks of sponsored content. Key Tetris characters on screen were Tetris producers in real life, a self-propaganda move we should only allow famous musicians. Flamin’ Hot reputation-manages a protagonist whose memoir the Los Angeles Times declared flamin’ bull. Air treats Michael Jordan as a god Nike incarnated in shoe form, the precise kind of celebrity-sponsorship navel-gazing you’d expect from a director between Dunkin’ commercials. I would say these brand biopics feel like infomercials, but infomercials were short and chintzy, not expensive and pointless.
I say again: Why? I have theories. Executives greenlight stories about executives. Creatives who built their fortunes off franchise sequels and brand sponsorships lack a healthy shame impulse to refuse corporate fanfiction. Maybe screenwriters love CNBC’s Shark Tank marathons. Maybe we’ve run out of obvious (and nonobvious) pieces of 20th century nostalgia to reboot, and now we’re reaching for the food aisle.
This dull renaissance can trace its deep roots in recent Hollywood pablum.
Unfrosted’s Pop-Tarts rocket launch is set to “Spirit in the Sky,” the Norman Greenbaum song that also ended 2016’s The Founder. Of course, that McDonald’s reverie was a just-okay commercial non-entity with zero awards presence that wound up embroiled in a lawsuit.
Still, we have to go back further to find the original source: Aaron Sorkin. After winning his comeback Oscar for 2010’s The Social Network, the screenwriter delivered 2015’s Steve Jobs, a much gentler tale of tech-industry bossdom.
Network made Mark Zuckerberg a brilliant cockroach. Jobs glanced at its own CEO’s flaws and marveled more at his iconography. It flopped.
Nonetheless these feature brand biopics reheat Jobs’ air of bantering nobility. Beanie’s heroines fight sexism. Hot’s spice incinerates institutional racism. Tetris vanquishes evil capitalists and communists. You feel filmmakers grasping for heroes; even kooky Unfrosted can’t resist a victory lap around the main Kellogg’s rival, Post.
BlackBerry (Elevation) and Ferrari (Neon) were more cynical, because you can count on indie studios to distrust globocorps. Still, those releases were minor and major failures, respectively. Air’s theatrical take looks low on paper, but the Amazon product exists outside that old industry truism that a Movie Must Make Money. The other films hail from Apple, Hulu and Netflix. Is there some secret nostalgia at work here? Back then, you just sold the damn shoe, none of these modern-day vapor metrics of “engagement,” “prestige,” or whatever a “view” really is.
Still, BlackBerry could be a model for a different kind of branded-content future: Less celebratory, more incisive, with genuine performances digging deeper than period schtick. Its soft box office, though, doesn’t necessarily make one imagine a BlackBerry 10, Part I is in the future.
I would like all of these movies to be as good as BlackBerry. But praising a great unsuccessful product makes me like Nick Offerman in The Founder, who bemoans “crass commercialism” while his savvier business partner takes McDonald’s global. I want to offer a solution which is crass and commercial. I want to take a page from Flamin’ Hot’s much-disputed book, and spice things up.
Every brand biopic suffers from the let’s-ask-Google problem (hey, can’t wait for the Sergey Brin-Larry Page hagiography one day). A quick search on any of the above-mentioned films reveal all the truths inconvenient to a three-act structure. Air brushed out bitter Nike exits for the Matt Damon and Jason Bateman characters. Barbie joked about everything except the German doll that Barbie ripped off. Beanie’s #Girlboss ending masks less triumphant fade-outs involving jail time and unresolved heartbreak.
Would these movies fly higher without their direct historical tethers? The inspirations could still be obvious, only veiled. The point would not be missed if Aronofsky directed a chaos tragedy about an internet tycoon who loves space and ketamine. Everyone knows Citizen Kane is about William Randolph Hearst; nobody complains that Orson Welles pretended Hearst was born poor. More fiction might uncover deeper truths, without the need to tiptoe around potential lawsuits or copyright infringements.
I know, I know. Projects built for brand recognition will never make the brand unrecognizable. But something must change. You shouldn’t feel a movie is selling you something. The movie is the product. If you’re watching, you’ve paid.
Don’t tell Seinfeld: The week he releases a Pop-Tarts movie is also the week he releases a Pop-Tarts commercial. He’s laughing all the way to the bank. At least somebody’s laughing about Unfrosted.
Darren Franich is a movie critic who writes The Draftland Scene.
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Yes yes, we know critics hate comedy. We know the reason critics want to be critics is to tell people what to think, and when everyone’s laughing nobody’s going to listen to you. (And the film is funny.)
That aside, it’s not a “corporate” film. Kellog’s was told about the film after it had been shot, edited and locked. At least do your homework, Franich.
Unfrosted is delightful fun featuring some of the funniest people currently on earth having unrestrained fun on screen. It’s a COMEDY, and it takes a big broad swing, as opposed to the dull half-measures of the mostly weak-ass dramedy fare being generated these days by the timid micro-managers currently running our entertainment industry. It’s the easiest and laziest thing in the world for a critic to sneer at a broad comedy. Silliness is always going to sound like stupidity in description. There’s no way to defend it from snobbery. Your pseudo intellectualism is a big reason scripted comedy barely exists anymore in movies and on tv. It’s why we can’t have nice things.