Hasta La Creative!

Where to start?

Benicio del Toro's spiked Billy Idol locks? Chris Pratt in a Michael Jackson leather jacket with an elderly Walkman? A raccoon wielding the very latest in tactical firearms atop a talking tree?

No, let's start with the real star of the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer, which premiered to huge fanfare Tuesday on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live (Disney is great at keeping this stuff in house, by the way—they own both Marvel Studios and ABC and will be distributing the movie, too): Scandanavian band Blue Swede's 1974 cover of "Hooked on a Feeling."

The song really probably shouldn't work with the space-opera-comedy-hybrid thing Marvel has been doing for the last couple of films (the tone here is similar to the studio's Thor: The Dark World), but it really, really does. It's a perfect counterpoint to the action and makes the absurdity of the whole enterprise part of the joke, rather than a liability. Does it work? Well, 3.5 million YouTube viewers can be wrong, but from a marketing perspective, they probably aren't. That number is rising, by the way.

The Guardians themselves have had one of the more porous member rosters in the Marvel portfolio. The current series, by Brian Bendis and Steve McNiven, was planned and set in motion while this movie was in pre-production, so it's a safe bet that the characters picked for this flick are as toyetic as possible (and indeed, are on display in multiple plastic forms in New York this week at the Javits Center for Toy Fair).

Anyway, this movie features Bradley Cooper as a talking woodland creature and Vin Diesel as an Ent. Check it out below.

If there is a rivalry between the two, it is by many measures a mismatch. But that hasn’t stopped the salivation at the story line: Netflix, the Silicon Valley interloper, taking on HBO, the establishment player.

A loss of roughly $1 billion in income from discontinued operations in the year-earlier period accounted for much of the decline.

Two studios offered smaller films aimed at audiences considered the least likely to be interested in the football game.

NBCUniversal announced it extended the contract of Donna Langley, chairwoman of Universal Pictures, through 2017 and handed her oversight of worldwide marketing and overseas production.

What if Patrick Bateman were a hipster? It would look a lot like this brilliant remake of two American Psycho scenes, updated for our decade of obsessive beard cultivation and vintage clothing perfection.

The nearly six-minute film, complete with hipsters committing murder set to classical music and comparing their pants like they're comparing their cocks, is actually an ad for Denham the Jeanmaker—whose stores are also now serving coffee. Denham is a small, boutique fashion brand focused on mixing denim with "workwear tradition." It's safe to say they're a brand created for the denim enthusiast, the sort of person who is as interested in the creation process behind their pants as they are in wearing them. In fact, their cheapest jeans currently retail for 130 euros, which may be more than I have spent on all the jeans I have purchased in my lifetime.

Created by Flickering Wall, the parody (aptly titled "Denham Psycho") was created to coincide with the opening of a Denham pop-up store in Berlin, has gone viral by hitting the twin zeitgeist of hipster humor and murderers who love civet coffee. Witness the terrifying brilliance, and fear for vapid, soulless hipsters everywhere.

CREDITS
Client: Denham the Jeanmaker
Agency: Flickering Wall
Directed by Hugo Keijzer
Produced by Remco den Hartog
Cinematography by Robbie van Brussel
Edited by Nils Rensen
Written by Ben Clark
Graphics by Ali Kirby
Costume by Denham

Sometimes, parody posters actually make you want to see a movie more than the real ads do. That's definitely the case with a few of these "honest" Photoshop recasts of Acadamy Award Best Picture nominees from College Humor.

Specifically, American Hustle might have done even better at the box office if it were really called "Jennifer Lawrence" and featured the tagline "wigs, tans, boobs."

Check out a few of the parodies below and the full gallery on College Humor.

Here's one baby that no one's expecting. "Devil Baby Attack," a rather mean-spirited if grimly hilarious marketing stunt for the upcoming horror film Devil's Due, shows what happens when well-meaning New Yorkers try to check on an unattended baby carriage.

Here's what happens: They get screamed at by a horrific demon infant. And sometimes chased around by the horrific demon infant's remote-controlled stroller.

Sure, the prank—by Thinkmodo, which also did last year's super-viral Carrie coffee-shop spot—sparks some fun jump-screams from passersby. But watching the results, it's hard not to think of last year's spot-on parody by Canadian agency John St. about the cruel lengths to which advertisers now seem willing to go.

If we must be subjected to more prankvertising stunts, it would be nice to see ones that punish people for making poor moral choices rather than watch normal pedestrians get tormented because they tried to check on a screaming baby left alone in the snow.

Via Mashable.

Officials may seek to break down country-by-country partitions that keep pay TV from being a single market in the European Union.

You guys remember that blog post about that ad that did a familiar thing in a fresh way? When a creative team took a clichéd trope and offered a meta commentary illustrating how hackneyed it was, but tied it to the client anyways? When it left at least one viewer with a smile on his face, and a vague sense of unease about what it was actually saying? That's what happens with this Canadian spot, featuring a coach appealing to his players by referencing a rousing, generic locker-room speech from a movie on Netflix. It's a fun idea. Too bad it sells the product as nondescript. Then again, nobody watches a sports flick looking for anything but the same old warm and fuzzes anyways. Agency: DDB Vancouver. Director: Michael Downing of Partners Film.