Gnomeo & Travelocity?

This may not be news to anyone, but it appears that Travelocity has a hand in Gnomeo & Juliet, at least as far as marketing goes. The famous discount travel website has a gnome as its mascot. You’ve probably seen him ski miserably down a flight of stairs or something.

Now: whether they funded the film or not, I don’t know. In any event, if you can move past the transposition of a Hamlet quote at the beginning, when you come to the end of the teaser posted by Touchstone Pictures today on their YouTube page, a link appears, and it isn’t for Touchstone.com or even GnomeoandJuliet.com: it’s Travelocity.com/Gnomeo. (See the video at the bottom of this post.)

I’m well aware of product placement, but this just seems (on the surface) a bit much. I hope it’s only a promotional gig, and Travelocity didn’t sponsor the entire production as some kind of massive, unprecedented (as far as I know) advertising campaign. I’m probably blowing this all out of proportion, since big companies get in on advertising with films all the time in some capacity, but it caught my eye, and I thought I’d share.

Either way, Gnomeo & Juliet comes out this Friday, Feb. 11th. I plan to see it. I’m a sucker for animated movies, and I personally think it could be pretty good. (And retellings of Shakespeare are fascinating in their own right.)

In the end, even if Travelocity was a producer of the film, I just hope it’s a good story and a good movie. Unless a Hitler fund (hypothetically) is responsible, it doesn’t really matter who paid for it. Does it?

Here’s the full teaser.

(Source: Touchstone Pictures)