Adaptable … Jackie Collins, whose work Tesco plans to adapt into a film. Photograph: Rex Features
Thinking logically, it was only a substance of time before Tesco got into the movie production commerce. After all, you be possible to already buy Tesco food, wear Tesco clothes, read Tesco magazines, theme on the Tesco phone network, heat your home with Tesco gas and electricity, dike by Tesco and go on a Tesco holiday, thus the film industry does seem to be the only pie that the supermarket hasn’t before that time jabbed some sort of adjunct into.
And now it’s happened: this week Tesco announced it was going to start making its own films. Admittedly, not any films you’circuitous route actually want to watch – they’ll all subsist straight-to-DVD finances, and the first release will be an adaptation of a Jackie Collins book – but it’s an interesting firmness nonetheless. A company with the past dispute clout of Tesco would be able to emporium the titles to kingdom come and, given its success rate in other ventures, there’s a good chance these DVDs will make everyone a lot of money regardless of their characteristic.
But what next? Since this is Tesco we’re talking about, it goes without saying that producing one version of each movie won’t be enough. Surely it’d be more in keeping with the concourse’s ethos to release divers – a Tesco Finest version starring Ralph Fiennes and Helen Mirren, a regular version by Mark Addy and Fay Ripley, and sooner or later a dirt-cheap Tesco Value endeavor featuring Kerry Katona and the bloke from the Go Compare adverts gooning around in an depraved pub car park while an unsteady spectator tries to record it on their mobile phone.
That’s not to mention the gratuitous product placement we should all expect from these films. Philip Pullman is apparently one of the authors discussing the contingency of letting Tesco adapt his books into films, but how much money would it take for him to agree to alter The Amber Spyglass so that it ends with Metatron essence bonked on the head with a 400g tin of Tesco cream of upstart broth or decapitated with a Tesco thin-and-crispy ham-and-pineapple pizza, a snip at the low, low worth of £1.50?
But conquer of all, should these Tesco movies turn out to be a profitable venture, it goes without saying that all the other supermarkets will fall over themselves to get in on the act, too. And that hardly bears thinking about. During every trip to Waitrose you’d be bombarded with adverts for whatever lonesome old Merchant Ivory-style period snoozefest it was about to free. Asda would quickly corner the market in glaring lowest-common-denominator rom-coms. Lidl would content its stores with badly dubbed versions of forgotten communist-era eastern European propaganda films. And, yes, every movie Sainsbury’s released would be rendered unwatchable because of its contractual obligation to cast Jamie Oliver in the lead.
Of course, you have the power to give over any of this from happening. All you need to do is somehow avoid buying Tesco’s first Jackie Collins adaptation on DVD. It’s asking a lot of you, I know – but if you dig deep I’m sure you can observe it.
