The Super Bowl is a night when Hollywood drops some of its best trailers. Having said that, one of the most talked about previews of 2018's Super Bowl was not even for a real movie. The fake Dundee reboot starring Danny McBride and an army of Australian movie stars became a highly-talked about ad all over the internet before it was finally revealed to be a commercial promoting Australian tourism. It's undoubtedly a bizarre premise that got people talking, and it turns out that the whole point was to capture the spirit of the movie hype machine.
The whole thing started with a push by Tourism Australia to find an exciting way to boost tourism to the island continent. Teaming up with ad agency Droga 5, the groups discovered that the last major boom in American tourism occurred alongside the release of the original 1986 Crocodile Dundee movie starring Paul Hogan. Taking that idea and running with it, the folks behind the campaign then blended that initial tourism boom with our current affinity for reboots after getting the rights from Hogan to resurrect the Dundee brand.
Much of this boils down to the process of capturing the essence of the hype of a blockbuster and channeling it into a commercial. Droga 5 group strategy director Will Davie opened up to THR about this decision and explained:
Can you create that tourism effect that film so uniquely creates without actually making the movie and taking $200 million and calling it a Hollywood blockbuster? The thought here is we know films are motivating, we know films are things people love and bind with. Rather than creating more ads that sell Australia with a video and an inspirational soundtrack -- because that stuff can just be turned into wallpaper -- we wanted something that's a little bit different. It's a prank, but also a demonstration of that truth.
From there, the commercial enlisted the talent of Alien: Covenant's Danny McBride and Thor: Ragnarok's Chris Hemsworth to star in the ads, with actors like Logan's Hugh Jackman and Suicide Squad's Margot Robbie (among many others) showing up for cameos that the crew shot later. McBride is the star of the show (he was apparently Hemsworth's idea) as the American son of the original Dundee, and now the plan is to feature him in roughly 150 different forms of ad content over the course of the next two years.
Of course, now that people have had a chance actually to see the star-studded trailer for the Dundee reboot, certain corners of the internet want to see it become a reality -- which is something that Chris Hemsworth has even expressed an interest in doing if the project makes sense. In fact, a petition has already started to bring these people back together and turn that fake Dundee movie into a real Dundee reboot.
Only time will tell if a new Dundee movie ever gets made, but CinemaBlend will keep you posted with more information as it becomes available to us. Until then, make sure to check out our movie premiere guide to keep yourself up-to-date on all of the real movies debuting this year.
