Stan claims a best picture nominee as its own

Stan was cleared of any wrongdoing in "the great Eat Pray Love streaming scandal" of earlier this month, but that doesn't necessarily mean all is well with the Australian streamer.

Except this time, I'm attacking them only for a silly marketing thing and perhaps a bit of excess and unwarranted pride.

You may recall, in the ultimately incorrect discussion of whether Stan streamed its movies at a sufficient quality (the fault with the poor stream lay elsewhere), that one of the things that gave me pause about unsubscribing from the service was that The Substance, my #1 of 2024, was about to start streaming there, and I really wanted to show it to my wife. It wasn't necessarily The Substance specifically that gave me pause, but the reminder that Stan has a definite benefit to me in that some movies become available there that aren't available on my other streamers, and may not be for some time. It being the #1 of my previous year just made for a quite prominent and well-timed example of that phenomenon.

My wife and I may watch it this coming weekend, but in the meantime, I came across the funny ad you see above.

You can read the surrounding content from one of my progressive news outlets, Daily Kos, if you want. But then come back to the ad.

Stan is calling The Substance a "brand new film." (More on my family's private joke about that particular phrasing later in the post.)

It's not the same as calling it a "Stan original film," which would definitely be a bridge too far. But the ad is attempting to deceive on some level, to take credit for a movie by implying a certain ownership or a certain exclusive right to make this film available to the world.

The Substance may be "new" in the broader, geological sense, and I would not harp on that phrasing if they just called it a "new film." But "brand" is a doubling down, a sense of underscoring its newness and pushing it out to the maximum end of that parameter. Something that's "brand" new, as opposed to just new, is something that you could not have accessed or experienced in any other way before now.

Not only is this patently wrong -- The Substance was released in Australia in September, having debuted at least a month before that at MIFF specifically and possibly at other festivals around the country, not to be mention becoming available for rental a couple months after that -- but even many casual readers of this ad would know it was wrong. 

If Stan has chosen to market The Substance heavily, as they should, it's because they know their viewers want to see it, as they should. But those viewers are inclined to see it because they have heard raves about it, and the more switched on of them -- they don't even need to be that switched on -- would know the movie has been nominated for multiple Oscars, including the top prize, and has already won a Golden Globe for Demi Moore's performance in addition to receiving several other nominations there. If you are even more switched on, you might be aware of the other awards it has won or where it has received nominations -- though by this point you'd probably be switched on enough to have already seen it.

So essentially, many of the people this ad is being pitched to would know it was trying to dupe them on some level, and that's not really a great place for any ad to be.

I said I'd get back to "brand new."

Stan has a lot of radio ads here for its offerings, and in that case they're more likely to be promotions of TV series, which likely still sell much better to customers than movies. The phrase "brand new" almost always makes its way into that ad copy, but a while back, at least a year ago, I noticed something about this ad copy that I pointed out to my kids, and especially the younger one brings it up regularly and thinks it's funny. 

While most people in the world contract those two words when they say them, so the D gets dropped and it sounds more like "brannew," the Stan ad copy reader went to broadcasting school, so of course he has to say the D. Which never doesn't sound awkward. He makes it sound less awkward because he's a professional, but try saying this out loud to yourself right there where your sit, only quietly, so the people around you don't think you're crazy. There's no way to pronounce the D in "brand new" without tripping up on the sound you are required to make in the middle and having the whole thing come out in sort of a sputter, when everyone knows what you're saying if you just say "brannew." In fact, I'd argue that if you say the D, it kind of doesn't actually sound like what you're trying to say, so rare is it. 

So when we call back to this, we always over-emphasize the sputtering D in the middle, like "bran-D-D-D-dnew." It never ceases to make us laugh. 

One final bit about The Substance while I have you, instead of creating a superfluous separate post on the topic. Actually two short bits:

1) I haven't read all the available writing on The Substance -- in fact, I haven't read 1% of it. But in the stuff I have read, I have never seen mentioned its similarity to a short film Coralie Fargeat made in 2014 called Reality+. A friend mentioned this similarity to me a couple days ago. Here is the plot synopsis for Reality+: 

"In a near future, the brain chip 'Reality+' acts on your sensory perceptions and allows you to see yourself with the perfect physique you've always dreamed of. All the people equipped with the chip can see your new appearance and you can see theirs. But the chip can only be activated for 12h a day..."

I almost snort-laughed to see how similar this is to The Substance, even down to the equal timeshare of the two modes. I can't necessarily use this as evidence of Fargeat's excessive fixation, since it's not uncommon for a director to build out an idea from one of their short films into feature length. I do think it's funny how little the concept has been modified. I don't watch a lot of short films but I may need to seek this one out.

2) Speaking of writing about The Substance, I just now noticed how much extra material there is in The Substance's Wikipedia entry, kind of like the written equivalent of all the DVD extras we used to get that expanded on how the film was made. I may have to set aside some time to read this at some point ... maybe either just before or just after the upcoming viewing with my wife.