Seth Rogen's new film Sausage Party has his personal signature all over it with his brand of bawdy humor that has made him a lot of money in the box office. For those who aren't aware, Sausage Party is a computer animated film that looks like something out of Pixar, and apparently, a theater in California learned that the R-Rated comedy is not kid's stuff. Yes, someone decided to this Seth Rogen film trailer before the hit Pixar film Finding Dory.
According to MovieWeb, a showing of Finding Dory at the Brenden Concord 14 Movie Theatre in Concord, California showed a trailer for the film which can be seen below. What is really strange is how the trailer starts like a kids' film, with food wanting to leave a supermarket, and then discovering what happens when they get home.
Oh yes, this trailer is full of dark humor as a living potato gets skinned alive, a head of lettuce screams as it is torn in half, some cheese is grated and responds like torture, and some baby carrots who try to escape are eaten alive. As an adult, I can't help but find this funny, but to a child, this might be a nightmare from Veggie Tales. Let's hope too many nightmares didn't happen to the younger audiences with these morbid Saving Private Ryan imagery with food.
Generally, R-Rated films are not shown before G-rated ones for good reasons. The theater manager stated that the Sausage Party trailer was an honest mistake by a theater manager moving screens around in an effort to accommodate last-minute groups wanting to see Finding Dory. Finding Dory has been doing incredibly well in filling the seats, so it is understandable how a mix-up could happen.
The wrong movie trailer was shown by mistake, and the theater manager was quick to apologize and attempt to put this mistake behind him. Of course, we are reporting on it, so it has hardly blown over. Also, Seth Rogen tweeted that he is saying that the story "made my day", which shows that he sees the event as pretty funny.
What is actually kind of funny is that it is easy to see how this happened. After all, the computer animated movie has become a staple of family entertainment since the days of Pixar with Toy Story and then Dreamworks with the Shrek series at an edgier PG. No one has ever really released an R-Rated fully computer animated film, and the most not family-friendly film that was CG was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in 2001.
However, considering that the film is called Sausage Party, which is something that I would rather define formally, but it refers to a situation where men outnumber the women. This is something that might be hard to market, but the poster for the film show a hot dog with the tagline "a hero will rise". I would rather not describe it, but it is full of innuendo. It's pretty clear that Seth Rogen is attempting something very different in breaking traditions, and it will be interesting to see if others don't try something similar. It really depends if the film is a hit or not. It will be in theaters on August 12.
