Now, stay with us on this one. There’s a bit of a journey to cover here.
The IT remake has been scaring the bejeezus out of people since hitting global screens earlier this month, ruining pants worldwide with its intensely high jump scare-per-minute ratio.
Over in Russia, however, it’s causing conniptions of a slightly more corporate kind.
The Russian arm of Burger King, as it turns out, has filed a complaint about the film because, according to them, Pennywise looks far too much like Ronald McDonald.
That’s Burger King, home of Whoppers, complaining that a clown in a horror movie is an exact copy of Ronald McDonald, the mascot for McDonald’s.
The yarn goes that Burger King has filed a complaint with Russia’s anti-monopoly board (presumably not to be confused with the anti-Scrabble board), asserting that Pennywise is an exact copy of Ronald, “including the colour range and the [balloons] with which the clown lures children,” holy god.
Their complaint is that due to this obvious and indistinguishable murder clown, McDonald’s as a result is copping a whole mess of free advertising. Which is true, as anyone who has seen the flick would know, due to the widespread and very real phenomena of people witnessing the cinematic circus demon devouring children and being suddenly overcome with the urge to run into the real-life burger clown’s loving embrace.
To clarify, this is Pennywise, the Dancing Clown from IT:
And this is the happy fry guy:
TBH I can’t tell the difference either.
Burger King Russia’s complaint is not expected to be successful.
