Less than four months away from release, Columbia Pictures released a new trailer for The Angry Birds Movie yesterday, complete with a 45-second scene in which the main gags are piss-swapping and piss-swallowing.
Watersports seems to be de rigueur for selling family animation nowadays; a trailer for DreamWorks’s Home also included a similar piss-drinking gag, along with a urinal cake-eating gag. No surprise, then, that Angry Birds’ writer is Jon Vitti, who also co-wrote Alvin and the Chipmunks, which featured a shit-eating gag.
Both Home and Alvin and the Chipmunks were successful enough at the box office, so the tasteless formulas work. And that’s what will ultimately determine the fate of Angry Birds: Will audiences buy into the predictable family animation formula once again?