For some time now, the movie industry has been desperate to locate the next big technological surge, the one leap forward that will bring in audiences like it was the good old days. For a while it looked like this would be 3D, but the resurgence soon fizzled out. Other advances, like Cineworld’s Screen X and 4DX, are hampered by the dual facts that they cost too much money and make it impossible to snooze through the boring bits.
So congratulations to Netflix, whose tireless research and development department has finally landed on the Big New Thing. The thing that will singlehandedly fling the medium decades into the future. You want it. You need it. That’s right: the future of cinema is a billboard that can convincingly secrete bodily fluids.
The billboard in question has been designed to promote the new Chris Hemsworth vehicle Extraction 2. Now, many of you will have already watched Extraction 2 – according to Netflix, it was viewed by more than 40 million people in its first three days alone – so you will already know whether it is good or not. But those of us who have not yet sampled the film’s numerous delights might need something to push us over the edge. And that something is a poster of Chris Hemsworth’s sweating face that will literally drip actual sweat on to us.
Extraction 2 has such intense action scenes that Chris Hemsworth is even sweating on the billboards! pic.twitter.com/WA9HJ0MbFo
— Netflix (@netflix) June 23, 2023
Last week, Variety wrote about the new street-level Extraction 2 billboards in New York and Los Angeles that, next to the caption “Action so intense our billboards sweat”, feature a large picture of Chris Hemsworth’s face. Hemsworth’s forehead has been riddled with laser holes that allow water to be pumped through them, in Variety’s words, “at a pressure and frequency to mirror the consistency of sweat”.
In short, it is clearly what moviegoing audiences have always wanted. Social media posts show a steady stream of delighted onlookers reaching out and touching Hemsworth’s sweat, dancing in the glow of such synthesised A-list perspiration. You can see them marvel as they make contact. “Wow,” they’re thinking. “Chris Hemsworth sure does sweat a lot in this billboard. I wonder if he really sweats that much during the film?” And then they can race home, kick their front door open and shout: “Honey! Put Netflix on! I don’t care about Extraction 2, but I want to broadly figure out whether or not Chris Hemsworth is able to sweat more than a poster I just saw.” Just like that, Extraction 2 becomes the biggest film in history.
Of course, it would be wrong to mention the Hemsworth billboard without at least acknowledging his forebears: the other billboards that walked so that Hemsworth could sweat. Last year Jurassic World: Dominion introduced an interactive billboard where a gigantosaurus reacted aggressively to any passing noise. And who could forget, for instance, the legitimately harrowing billboard campaign debuted by the New Zealand government in 2009 to promote safer driving, in which a giant image of a child’s face began to bleed from its eyebrows, nose, ears and mouth whenever it rained?
But the sweating Extraction 2 billboard is head and shoulders above these. It isn’t as technologically complex as the Jurassic World one, and it’s less likely to literally haunt every dream you ever have for the rest of your life than the bleeding child one. This is sweat. It’s intimate. You sweat in moments of great joyous exertion. You sweat during moments of great tension. It’s relatable. People will see that picture of Chris Hemsworth sweating like he’s stuck on a rail replacement bus service during a heatwave, and they’ll think: “Hey, this guy is just like me. Maybe he also feels self-conscious when he hugs women for the first time, because he knows that they’ll recoil when they discover how damp his back is.”
Extraction 2 has already been such a success that Extraction 3 is now in the works. And it is honestly hard to see how they’ll be able to up the marketing ante from this. What will the billboard for the next film do? Make Chris Hemsworth spit? Urinate? Transmit airborne respiratory illnesses? Admit it, you can’t wait to find out either.
