By now, you’ve almost definitely seen the various terrible videos for 20th Century Fox movies featuring Manchester United players. The football team and the film studio have signed a deal to promote Fox’s 2016 output, and while the partnership involves several different elements, what’s grabbed the most attention has been the specially made trailers featuring United players interacting with characters from upcoming films. The latest video is a trailer for Independence Day: Resurgence, with Wayne Rooney, Juan Mata, Daily Blind, Chris Smalling and Ashley Young moonlighting as fighter pilots taking down the alien invaders. It follows an X-Men: Apocalypse clip, with Professor X recruiting Rooney to the team, and a Deadpool one, with Ryan Reynolds’ anti-hero dreaming of scoring a penalty for United. All three are absolutely god-awful — not just bad, but spectacularly, bafflingly bad, the sort of thing makes you wonder how the hell they ever got approved and made. But I think that’s completely deliberate, and what makes them so effective.
How Hollywood Studios are Using Footballers to Sell Their Big Movies
Why do those terrible Wayne Rooney film trailers exist?
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