Tom Cruise starred in a tux at Cannes, but in an Airstream in "Top Gun: Maverick" this summer.
Airstream trailers long have been favorite playthings for movie and television directors to use as props and even sometimes in story lines, and the fact that Hollywood has picked up on the aura of the silver-bullet trailers has tremendously boosted the cachet attached to the luxury-RV brand.
But this summer may have been a topper. Not only did Airstream work with the producers of Top Gun: Maverick to place star Tom Cruise in one of its trailers during the opening sequence, but one of the most popular streaming-TV series of the season, Netflix’s Virgin River, devoted lots of adoring attention to an Airstream in its last few episodes. That’s not to mention a handful of automobile commercials where the star vehicles were towing Airstreams.
The Top Gun producers took the usual route of reaching out to the Jackson Center, Ohio-based brand to work with Airstream on borrowing a trailer to house Cruise’s swashbuckling fighter-jet character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. But when Virgin River protagonists Mel, played by Alexandra Breckenridge, and Jack, played by Martin Henderson, cozied together for Jack’s marriage proposal on a riverside deck that’s part of an Airstream set-up, Airstream executives saw the sequence for the first time.
“We’d love to take credit anytime you see an Airstream in anything, but sometimes it just happens,” Airstream CMO Mollie Hansen told me. “We saw [the Virgin River scenes] with the rest of the world. But because of the iconic nature of our product and because we represent camping — and we have a strong brand — a lot of companies do reach out to us.
“A lot [of placements], we do know about. Companies reach out to us and ask us, and we have a small fleet of vehicles we make available to them because the benefits are enormous. We get exposure and national advertising that we wouldn’t have the budget to pay for.
“But sometimes we get little gifts along the way in publications or movies that use our product and we find out along with the rest of the world,” Hansen said. In these cases, production companies simply haven’t filled out the usual paperwork.
“It’s exciting for Airstream owners to be able to talk about it, and a point of pride to have found where Airstreams show up,” she said. Airstreams have shown up in everything from Super Bowl advertisements to bad movies, but the appearances are almost always a boon for the brand.
And in the case of Virgin River, there was a double bonus: Before the romantic, dimly lit marriage-proposal scene toward the end of Season 4, Henderson’s character got excited about starting a “glamping” business behind his restaurant in the town with “a couple of Airstreams.” The first “glamper” was where the proposal unfolded.
Surely, the silver bullet will be making more appearances in Season 5.
