In the Weirdest Cross-Promotion Ever, Fandango Wants to Send You to Space

By Vivian Kane | Miscellaneous | October 31, 2014 |

By Vivian Kane | Miscellaneous | October 31, 2014 |

There’s nothing strange with a little film cross-promotion. We see it all the time. Like when the X-Men did ads for burgers (and sexism), or how Spider-Man apparently works for the U.S. Postal Service in his off time. But this new campaign for Interstellar is a whole new level of weird.

Fandango, VICE Magazine’s Motherboard blog, and Paramount have teamed up for a contest to send one movie-goer into space. Like, actual space. By buying your Interstellar tickets through Fandango, you can be entered to win a spot on a XCOR Aerospace, Inc. flight in 2017, which will travel roughly 62 miles above the Earth. They’ll also throw $50,000 on top of that for good measure. If you win, but are deemed unfit for space, they’ll just give you $75,000 to stop your tears.

If booking your space travel through a movie app didn’t already seem like the worst, least safe idea ever, the contest is now particularly ill-timed. Earlier today, Richard Branson’s pet project Virgin Galactic saw one of its ships crash during a test flight, killing the pilot. So no thank you, Fandango, I’m perfectly content to see Matthew McConaughey pretend to go to space and leave it at that.

Via AV Club.