War Of The Worlds producer swears all that Amazon product placement was a happy accident

Patrick Aiello swears the Prime Video Ice Cube bomb was intended for theatrical release—and that he really does just like Amazon that much.

By William Hughes | August 29, 2025 | 9:41pm

An Amazon logo prominently featured in War Of The Worlds, Screenshot: YouTube

Film News War Of the Worlds

War Of The Worlds producer swears all that Amazon product placement was a happy accident

Let us contemplate, just for a moment, a philosophical question. To wit: Is it better to make a sci-fi action movie whose climax entirely rests on the products and services of the Amazon corporation if you are in the pocket of big online retail, or if you’re not? Is it a more noble motivation to splash the company’s logo up on your screen for minutes at a time because it’s earning you and your buddies a fat, slightly unscrupulous paycheck? Or because you genuinely think your film wouldn’t work as well without Jeff Bezos’ thumbprint jammed square down onto the middle of the frame?

These queries brought to you by a new interview with War Of The Worlds producer Patrick Aiello, who swears that the many, many references to Amazon products in the film—which ended up being released direct-to-streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video service—had nothing to do with corporate pressure or money changing hands. After all, Aiello had always assumed the film would get a theatrical release by distributor Universal Pictures—to the point that the whole thing was fully completed, and never altered in any way, before Amazon ended up swooping in to serve as its streaming home. Which makes the film’s massive amount of brand integration, somewhat bafflingly, a coincidence.

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This is per a genuinely fascinating interview Aiello and editor Charles Ancelle gave to Toni’s Film Club this week, one of the most frank conversations we’ve ever seen with a producer in the immediate aftermath of a massive critical bomb. Patrick Aiello has, indeed, seen your many, many criticisms of, and memes about, the movie he and director Rich Lee made: The visible green screen reflected in Ice Cube’s glasses. (They tried to get it all in post, ran out of money.) The massive negative critical reaction. (He thinks the title misled people into thinking they’d be getting something “grander” than a screenlife paranoia thriller.) The huge amounts of Amazon brand integration sprinkled throughout the movie. (Friends, Patrick Aiello has answers.)

For instance: Why does so much of the film’s climax hinge on the actions of an Amazon delivery driver, played by Devon Bostick? To pay homage to the true lockdown-era heroes: “In the early months… when you weren’t going to the grocery store and you couldn’t get toilet paper,” Aiello reminisced, speaking with the glib confidence of a man whose movie has been sitting at the top of Amazon’s viewing charts for weeks, critical consensus be damned. “Who was bringing us— individually, to all of our homes—all of these products to keep us going, keep us neutral, keep us surviving? Amazon drivers. These individuals are unsung heroes. They are not identified as such, it’s not people’s dream to become delivery people, but at the end of the day, they are rendering a personal service to humanity, and they are doing so without ego.”

Okay, we guess that sort of tracks, in a sort of bloody-minded consumerism way. But, then, why does the film have the Amazon Prime Air logo literally splashed up on the screen for minutes at a time, as a drone tries to deliver Ice Cube a magical USB stick to save the world from aliens? Because that sequence—editor Ancelle explains—had two bits of drone footage running at the same time, and viewers got confused if there wasn’t a visual element distinguishing them. Okay, okay… Well, why does a major moment hinge on a guy being bribed with an Amazon gift card to go flip the drone over and save the day? Because once you’ve already got an Amazon-connected character in your movie, that apparently starts to seem like the easiest way to get someone instant cash in order to bribe the “everyman” into an act of heroism. It all makes a certain kind of sense, provided you started by thinking about Amazon as the secondary hero of your entire movie.

Aiello does note that the film’s many bits of product placement did end up working, weirdly, in reverse: When Universal decided it wasn’t going to release War Of The Worlds theatrically and started shopping it to all the streamers, Amazon was immediately—understandably—intrigued by this bizarre love letter that Aiello and Rich had made for them. (To say nothing, we can only assume, of being excited that the movie hit so many of Jeff Bezos’ famed “perfect storytelling” notes.) But Aiello is adamant that the film was already fully completed by that point, with no additional input taken from the streamer—which was simply happy to pick up and release what many people have called “a feature-length Amazon commercial”—apparently filmed that way on spec.

[via IGN]