Rian Johnson, director of Knives Out, has revealed something of a film industry secret; the technology behemoth, Apple, doesn’t like bad guys using iPhones.
Initially, it seems like standard business strategy. You don’t become a trillion dollar company without a certain level of diligence in your image control.
Rian Johnson has revealed that Apple don’t like bad guys using iPhone’s in movies. Real life bad guys are fine, though.
However, particularly in mystery films such as Knives Out, Apple’s rule starts running into obvious problems. The guy without the iPhone is evil, end of story, let’s go home. Outside of any instances of product placement, filmmakers generally avoid Apple products for this reason. A nondescript iPhone-but-not-an-actual-iPhone is normally the safe bet.
The policy also overestimates the influence of fictional antagonistic characters, while ignoring the influence of nonfictional ones. A Tweeting, unabashed xenophobe, and supposed leader of the Western world’s most powerful country comes to mind.
President Trump often tweets about Apple between his various expressions of nationalism and exclusion. It has never been publicly apparent, however, that the company is intent on distancing itself from such an inflammatory and polarising figure.
Looking at Apple themselves, avoiding associations with fictional characters for moral reasons becomes pretty tragic, very quickly. A monopolistic company that outsources its manufacture, facilitating child labour and unpaid overtime to meet production targets. There should be a movie about that… without iPhones, though.
