The Disney+ launch film Noelle provides family-friendly holiday entertainment, and it’s also designed to keep viewers thinking about Apple iPads. The product placement is so absurd throughout the movie that even innocent children are used to help sell the Apple brand. And that's not the only weird thing in the movie.
Noelle stars Anna Kendrick as the title character who tries to find her missing brother Nick (Bill Hader), the new Santa. The story transfers back and forth from the North Pole to Phoenix, Arizona, and with a few international stops along the way. Shirley MacLaine co-stars as Elf Polly, Billy Eichner portrays Noelle and Nick’s tech-savvy cousin Gabriel, and Kingsley Ben-Adir rounds out the main cast as private investigator Jake Hapman. While Noelle certainly won’t pick up any Oscar nominations, it’s mostly a perfectly fine launch movie for Disney+ subscribers.
Unfortunately, Noelle’s product placement is a bit over-the-top. As a result, the Disney+ film loses some of its magical holiday spirit. For example, an early sequence includes Noelle and Nick discussing how to connect with children. And what all children want, according to Noelle, is an iPad; a concept that's hammered away by Santa's little helpers, over and over, throughout the film. Writer and directer Marc Lawrence plays it for laughs as a recurring gag, but the overt promotional angle is overly-aggressive, evidenced first by an early joke about various people who clearly want iPads, based only on Noelle looking at their photos.
Shortly after the first iPad sequence, Noelle then places the magazine Travel + Leisure front and center, through both character dialogue and visuals. In fact, this particular product placement is part of the film’s inciting incident, as Noelle informs Nick that she read an article about the perfect Christmas getaway locations. Nick then takes off for Phoenix, and plans to stay for good. When Noelle tracks him down, Polly is seen reading Men’s Health. A character named Helen Rojas explains to Noelle that she’s not interested in a Santa “promotional stunt.” The most egregious product placement in Noelle comes when Noelle visits a homeless shelter. While speaking with a deaf girl, Noelle suddenly gains the ability to understand American Sign Language and learns that the child not only wants her mother to get a job, but also wants an iPad.
As Noelle reaches its second half, the iPad product placement remains part of the storyline. Nick speaks with Phoenix children as Santa, and learns - through the Punjabi language - that a boy wants his cousin from another country to visit Phoenix, and that he would also like an iPad. Another kid named Roberto reads a message from (fake) Santa and holds up an iPhone (just in case viewers still weren’t sure what’s being sold). Gabriel later references Apple’s Genius Bar, and a young child named Evelyn Ramirez holds up a supersized iPad while learning that she’s been cancelled by (fake) Santa Gabriel, due to her questionable behavior during the previous year.
When Noelle reaches it end, iPads appear once again at the North Pole as elves conveniently display the Apple product in the front row of a church. Kendrick then gives a big speech, as Noelle, and states that Christmas is about “the presents we give…the presents of love and understanding…and also iPads.” Finally, the homeless and deaf girl named Michelle receives an iPad, while her mother receives a job listing for the deaf. Overall, whether this was paid for by Apple or something the filmmakers just wanted to do for laughs, it was far too excessive and came off as absurd.