Bland Name Product / Film

• 21st Century Serial Killer: Aaron has an issue of TINE Magazine with an article about famous serial killers in it.
• In About Scout, Scout looks up Sam on search.com, whose logo uses the same colors as Google's. Weirdly, Sam uses the word "Google" when he sees what she's doing.
• Airplane! does this with a flashback involving Supperware, an ersatz of Tupperware. Also the name of the airline, Trans America Airlines, is a stand-in for Trans World Airlines.
• Most of the video games shown or mentioned in Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie are bland-name products of real games. This includes E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a major focal point of the story, which is now spelled "Eee Tee". The movie also features "YouPooed" as a stand-in for YouTube. However, Rolling Rock, the Nerd's signature beer brand, is surprisingly unchanged.
• Bang the Drum Slowly: The Mammoths are wearing uniforms identical to the New York Yankees, while the other teams they play wear the uniforms of the New York Mets, Boston Red Sox, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cleveland Indians and Philadelphia Phillies. They all apparently play in the same fictional league, since in '73, there's no way the Yankees would be playing the Mets, Pirates or Phillies. The film thanks all of those real MLB clubs at the end, so they did have the option of using the real Yankees name, but the film remained faithful to the book.
• Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice: Bob and Carol visit a hippy-dippy New Age therapy retreat that is obviously supposed to be the Esalen Institute. But the producers apparently didn't want to pay the folks at Esalen, so it's only called "the Institute".
• In Buffalo '66, the many items of memorabilia shown relating to the Queen City's NFL team use the word "Buffalo" where you would expect to see the Bills' logo.
• Coming to America has McDowell's, a knock-off of McDonald's. It's Lampshaded wonderfully^note the production had to get permission from McDonald's because of the similarities and an actual franchisee angrily confronted characters dressed in McDowell's uniforms before they showed that it was a fake restaurant for a movie.
  Cleo: Look... me and the McDonald's people got this little misunderstanding. See, they're McDonald's... I'm McDowell's. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds. My buns have no seeds.
• In Death Wish and many other movies, TIME magazine has appeared as "Tempo".
• Disaster Movie shows screenshots of sites named "FaceNook" and "uPay". Which are then promptly referred to in dialogue as Facebook and eBay. Apparently the owners of those sites didn't give Seltzer and Friedberg as much money as Apple did.
• A literal version in Dr. Strangelove when the title character makes reference to a study by the BLAND Corporation, a pun on the RAND Corporation.
• Brazilian movie Eike - Tudo ou Nada, a biography of billionaire who eventually broke Eike Batista, features how he married a local sex symbol and her posing nude during their marriage. It shows a magazine cover that recreates one of said pictorial's promotional images, but without the name Playboy, replaced by a rough French translation, Jeux D'Hommes (men games).
• In the Evil Dead films, Ash works at the local S-Mart, an obvious stand-in for K-Mart. The store's snappy, self-writing slogan "Shop Smart! Shop S-Mart!" kind of makes you wonder why no major real-life retailers ever thought to use the name for themselves (there are a few small, independent shops that have).
• In Ex Machina, Blue Book is pretty much Google in all but name. It even sounds like "Google" when they say it quickly.
• Fireproof has a Honeycomb cereal box altered to read "Coney-Bomb."
• In Four Lions, terrorists covertly communicate online by joining a children's MMORPG called Puffin Party, which is clearly inspired by Club Penguin.
• In Home Alone, the McCallisters have pizza delivered from "Little Nero's" instead of Little Caesar's. This actually had a brief Defictionalization moment when, on November 6, 2015, UberEATS ran a promotion allowing fans to order pizza from local restaurants but delivered them in Little Nero's boxes by drivers wearing Little Nero's hats.
• I'm Thinking of Ending Things: Tulsey Town, an ice cream chain where the thick 'Brrr's are served upside down, allude to Dairy Queen and its Blizzards. ^note The book actually used the name "Dairy Queen".
• In Idiocracy, Brawndo is largely a stand-in for Gatorade. The main character, who's from the present day, even mentions that it "tastes just like Gatorade". In a bizarre twist, Brawndo became a drink in Real Life — and is a citrus-flavored energy drink, like Monster and Amp, rather than a sports drink like Gatorade. Legend has it they wanted to use Gatorade, but Gatorade refused. Several other real companies agreed to allow their names to be used, even though they were used in a disrespectful way (Fuddruckers, Costco, Starbucks, Carl's Jr.).
• The Kentucky Fried Movie had many examples, including Willer (Miller) Beer, Barker (Parker) Brothers, "Feel-a-Round" (Sensurround), Nytex P.M. (Nyquil P.M.) and Nesson Oil (Wesson Oil).
• Killer Under the Bed: When Kilee tries to look up info on her Voodoo Doll again, she uses Giggo Search.
• Kimi: Kimi is this for Amazon's Alexa - a smart home product raising questions about privacy.
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, Valentine's glasses have an extra plastic piece above his right eye. Although no attention is drawn to it, it strongly resembles a Google Glass.
• Liberal Arts does this with the The Twilight Saga books. Although it wasn't mentioned by name, the "vampire book" that sparks an argument between the two main characters is based on the book series' second installment and is titled "Lunar Moon" (based on Twilight's New Moon). This is likely done to avoid a Celebrity Paradox with cast member Elizabeth Reaser, who also plays Esme Cullen in the Twilight movies.
• The Left Behind film series has Buck Williams working for Global News Network (GNN).
• Leprechaun makes a joke about the titular monster feasting on a box of a leprechaun-branded cereal called Lucky Clovers. The use of this trope gets semi-unintentionally (and all-amusingly) highlighted in the climax of the film where one of the characters says in a Pre-Mortem One-Liner "Fuck you, Lucky Charms!" Perhaps Lucky Clovers is an in-universe knockoff?
• A poster for Muppets Most Wanted shows the Muppets in a British railway station reading a tabloid newspaper called the Daily Muppet. The logo is based on that of the Daily Mirror (although not the contemporary version, being more like the 1997 design), and it even has the slogan "Real Muppets, Unreal News", spoofing the Mirror's "Real News, Real Entertainment".
• The Natural: The Knights are quite obviously one to the New York Yankees themselves.
• Most appearances of the UNIX operating system in movies from The '80s and The '90s, like The Net. It will usually appear as UN*X when mentioned. This is at least partly Truth in Television. Companies that developed proprietary versions used names like Ultrix (Digital), IRIX (Silicon Graphics), AIX (IBM), etc. (partly because UNIX is a registered trademark and partly for branding reasons) and the standard convention when one wanted to refer to things-similar-to-but-not-exactly UNIX was to represent it as "Un*x".
• In The Pact, Google is replaced by Global, complete with the now-outdated serif-font logo.
• The energy drink "Minotaur" in Role Models is clearly intended as a stand-in for Red Bull.

  • Likewise, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause has a "Red Deer" vending machine.

• In See For Me, blind Sophie uses an app called See For Me that connects the user to a sighted volunteer who will describe what they see through the phone camera to the user. It is based upon the real life app Use My Eyes.
• Slaxx is set inside a trendy boutique called Canadian Cotton Clothiers, which, with its "ethical" branding, "millennial hipster" target demographic, Cult of Personality around its founder Harold Landsgrove, and Alliterative Name, is pretty bluntly a parody of American Apparel (except, obviously, Canadian).
• On Babel 13 in Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, there are advertising posters for "Baaburger" (Hesburger, featured itself at the beginning of Pirk's flashback) and "Baabsolut Vodka" (Absolut Vodka). Justified by Babel 13 being located in a parallel universe.
• In Steps Trodden Black, Alex buys energy drinks which are named Hurricane Handjob and Cocaine Tears.
• In the first Stuart Little, Stuart gets a suit from a toy store selling the doll "Ben", an obvious reference to the Ken doll off by just one letter.
• Tapeheads has RVTV (Rock Video TV), a thinly-veiled stand-in for MTV, who wouldn't let the filmmakers use their name.
• In Top Gun, the opposing force flies a fictional plane described as a "MiG-28." It's a plausible name, given the USSR's naming scheme in which planes are numbered sequentially and the word component describes the company that made it... but the actual 28th aircraft in the Russian fleet was made by Sukhoi (the Su-28, natch). Meanwhile, the "MiG-28" was "played" by American-made F5-E Tiger II fighters, on loan from the actual TOPGUN seminar where they were being used as Real Life Weapons Understudies, in Evil Wears Black paint schemes. (Which they kept after filming was done!)
  • Likewise, in the sequel Top Gun: Maverick, the OPFOR's cutting-edge aircraft is described merely as a "5th-Generation Fighter." That may sound un-specific, but there were only 4 types of 5th-gen fighter in the air at the time, and 2 were in the United States Air Force. The plane itself, the fourth and most recent of those fighters, is an all-CGI Sukhoi Su-57.
• Undercover Brother:
  • When General Boutwell sets up a chain of fried chicken restaurants, he calls it GFC, General's Fried Chicken (AKA KFC/Kentucky Fried Chicken).
  • Penelope Snow and Antoine Jackson go shopping at Khaki Republic, which was based on Banana Republic.
• In the Wayne's World films, ubiquitous Canadian restaurant Tim Horton's Donuts becomes the film's fictional Stan Mikita's Donuts. Horton and Mikita are both Hockey Hall-of-famers. Actor-writer Mike Myers grew up in Scarborough ("Scarberia"), a suburb of Toronto, where Horton played; character Wayne Campbell lived in Aurora, outside Chicago, where Mikita played his entire NHL career.
• The Made-for-TV Movie Without Warning (1994) consists of a Phony Newscast on an unnamed network with a logo that vaguely resembles the CBS "eye". Notable in that this was not done to avoid trademark infringement — the movie appeared on CBS, which would naturally have the rights to its own logo — but to provide a subtle hint to the audience that what they were watching was fictional.

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