UPDATE Thursday PM: Turns out, initial comment from Toyota was mistaken, and there was indeed a product placement deal with God’s Not Dead 2. The plot thickens! Wait, no, thins. I mean thins.
There’s a long tradition of “faith-based” filmmakers pandering to the American South, to “the heartland,” to “flyover states,” to anyone Republican politicians like to refer to as “the real America.” Heaven is for Real is a typical example, featuring many (many) shots of the protagonist driving his beat-up pick-up truck through sun-drenched fields of amber wheat. (He also broke a shin trying to leg out a triple in softball, but that’s neither here nor there.)
The God’s Not Dead films used to fit easily into this tradition. They had a promotional partnership with the Duck Dynasty guys, your prototypical, pick-up-drivin’ good ol’ boys. In some ways, the sequel still does, and God’s Not Dead 2 includes a Duck Dynasty shout-out during the jury selection scene, as I noted in my review. But in a surprising twist, the Toyota Prius gets even more screen time.
In a movie that’s otherwise full of the kind of predictable pandering we’re used to (Christian rock rules! The ACLU guy hates Marines!), there are at least three scenes that felt like Prius product placement. In one of the first scenes, a cancer-surviving blogger played by Trisha LaFache (I wouldn’t even know where to start trying to explain this character) drives around in her Prius, dictating blog posts into her phone (which is definitely a realistic thing for a person to do). I assumed this character would become an antagonist, some smug, big-city librul who’d show up to get taught a lesson, or find Jesus and learn one. At which point maybe she’d trade her Prius in for a Dodge and join FarmersOnly.com. These assumptions proved incorrect, one of the movie’s few surprises.
Then there’s the pastor character, played by Pure Flix co-founder and God’s Not Dead 2 producer David AR White, a lumpy Dutchboy who looks like he moonlights in a Nickelback cover band. He mentions his Prius early on, and then later, at a meeting with some fellow pastors, they ask him, “Hey, Pastor Dave, still got that Prius?” And he’s like, “Yep, runs great!” and practically winks at the camera.
It’s… very odd. And I wasn’t the only one to notice. In her review for Flavorwire, Alissa Wilkinson writes:
Product placement isn’t dead, either; Priuses make repeated, strangely emphatic and name-droppy appearances for reasons I cannot divine but that may have something to do with film-production tax breaks. (The movie is also weirdly preoccupied with men’s black leather dress shoes.)
I too assumed this was product placement, and pretty blatant at that. But… the Prius? The vehicle of choice for upper middle class moms with “Coexist” bumper stickers wanted to sponsor a movie based on right-wing email forwards, the Reefer Madness for paranoid fundamentalists?
My first thought was, maybe Toyota is trying to change the kinds of associations people have with Priuses, to reach beyond their typical audience. Get some of that sweet, God, ducks and pick-up trucks money. Not a bad idea, from a marketing standpoint. But I reached out to a member of Toyota’s media team who said that there was no advertising deal, that God’s Not Dead 2‘s Prius pimping was “purely coincidental.” Pure Flix hasn’t responded.
As of last month, Pure Flix was running a sweepstakes where 10 winners would win a year-long subscription to Pure Flix’s streaming service, and the grand prize winner would win, you guessed it, a 2016 Toyota Prius. Is Toyota fibbing, and there is a partnership, but they don’t want to admit it publicly? Maybe. Or are they telling the truth, and the Pure Flix honchos just love their Priuses so much that they wanted to spread the gospel? Through multiple scenes in the film and a giveaway? That seems unlikely to me, but stranger things have happened. And we are dealing with a group that loves to evangelize.
Paid for or not, it’s easily the strangest product placement partnership I’ve seen this year.
Vince Mancini is a writer, comedian, and podcaster. A graduate of Columbia’s non-fiction MFA program, his work has appeared on FilmDrunk, the UPROXX network, the Portland Mercury, the East Bay Express, and all over his mom’s refrigerator. Fan FilmDrunk on Facebook, find the latest movie reviews here.