How M&Ms Turned Down E.T. and Made Reese's Pieces Famous Forever
How M&Ms Turned Down E.T. and Made Reese's Pieces Famous Forever
In 1982, one of the most valuable marketing opportunities in the history of advertising was offered to a company called Mars, Incorporated. Mars made M&Ms, the most recognisable candy in the world. The opportunity involved a small, relatively unknown peanut-butter candy that Mars had never heard of, a film that had not yet been released, and a trail of sweets laid across a garden path to lure an alien out of a wooden shed.Mars said no.
The candy that ended up in the film was Reese's Pieces. The film was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Within two weeks of its release, Reese's Pieces sales had risen 65 per cent. The Hershey Company, which made Reese's Pieces, turned a one-million-dollar promotional investment into what its own executives calculated as fifteen to twenty million dollars' worth of advertising. And the rules of product placement in film — which barely existed as a formal practice in 1982 — were rewritten entirely by the thirty-odd seconds that an alien spent eating orange, yellow and brown peanut-butter candies in Steven Spielberg's garden shed.
M&Ms in the Original Script
The screenplay for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, as originally written, called for M&Ms. This is not disputed. The novelisation of the film, written by William Kotzwinkle and published before the filming decisions were finalised, still has Elliot offering M&Ms to the alien. Spielberg later said that M&Ms were his personal favourite candy, which is why they appeared in the script in the first place.Kathleen Kennedy — then Steven Spielberg's assistant and later the president of Lucasfilm, the person who now shepherds the Star Wars franchise — was responsible for approaching Mars with the proposal. The offer was a product placement in an upcoming science-fiction family film, with promotional tie-ins to coincide with the release. Mars deliberated. Universal Studios declined to share the full script with the company, partly because Spielberg was keeping the film — and particularly the appearance of E.T. himself — under strict secrecy. Mars could not see what they were agreeing to.
With production looming and no deal in place, Kennedy and Spielberg needed an alternative. The various accounts of why Mars ultimately said no differ in detail. Some say the company was uncomfortable with the idea of their candy being associated with an extraterrestrial. Others say that the internal decision-making process at Mars was simply too slow, and the opportunity lapsed. An M&M's spokesperson told The Washington Post after the film's release that they had no clear record of having been approached at all — suggesting that somewhere in the chain of communication, the proposal had not reached the right person. Whatever the reason, the outcome was the same. M&Ms were out.
The Call to Hershey
Universal approached The Hershey Company next, initially proposing Hershey's Kisses as the candy for the scene. Hershey's response was to counter-propose their own newer product: Reese's Pieces. The candy had launched in 1978 — just four years before the film — and was still relatively unknown outside the United States. It was a small, colourful candy with a peanut-butter centre, visually similar to M&Ms in format, but tasting entirely different. It needed a sales boost. Hershey's vice-president of new-business development, Jack Dowd, recognised the opportunity and moved quickly to secure it.The deal Hershey signed was straightforward in structure but unusual in precedent. Hershey paid Universal one million dollars — not for the placement in the film, but for the promotional rights that came with it: the right to use E.T. in Hershey advertising, the right to create branded merchandise, the right to position Reese's Pieces as the alien's candy of choice in the marketing campaign that would run alongside the film's release. The actual placement in the movie cost Hershey nothing. They were not paying to put their product on screen. They were paying for everything that would happen after it appeared there.
Spielberg agreed immediately. As he later said of the collaboration: 'In a way, Reese's Pieces was relatively new in '82. We sort of helped each other.'
Thirty Seconds in a Garden
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial premiered on 11 June 1982. The film's plot — a lonely ten-year-old boy named Elliot befriends a stranded alien, hides him from government authorities, and helps him contact his home planet — needed a mechanism to bring E.T. out of hiding in the first place. Elliot uses what he has to hand: a bag of Reese's Pieces, scattered as a trail across the garden and into his bedroom.The scene is brief. E.T. appears in a few frames of garden darkness, following the candy. But the image — an alien hand reaching for a small orange and yellow sweet — embedded Reese's Pieces in the visual memory of the largest cinema audience in history. E.T. went on to become the highest-grossing film ever made at that point, surpassing Star Wars. It earned more than $350 million at the worldwide box office in its initial release.
The Reese's Pieces that appeared on screen for those seconds were real product. Real packaging. Children who saw the film could walk out of the cinema and buy the same candy that E.T. had eaten. Many did. Within two weeks of the film's release, Reese's Pieces sales had risen 65 per cent. Some distributors were reordering as many as ten times during that period. Hershey moved quickly to partner with cinema concession stands — Reese's Pieces began appearing in cinemas for the first time as a direct consequence of the film. Jack Dowd later assessed that the one-million-dollar investment had generated fifteen to twenty million dollars' worth of promotion for the brand.
The Product Placement That Changed Everything
Before E.T., the formal concept of a brand paying for film placement barely existed as an industry. Companies had appeared in films before — products had always appeared on screen — but the idea of a structured financial arrangement with performance metrics and promotional tie-ins was almost entirely new. Kathleen Kennedy later acknowledged that product placement was a 'relatively new business' in the early 1980s. The E.T. deal was built without a template, because there was no template.The year after E.T., Tom Cruise wore Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses in Risky Business. Ray-Ban sales increased by 50 per cent. The Wayfarers, which had been a declining product in the early 1980s, became one of the defining accessories of the decade. The message from both films was identical: a product on screen in the right moment, in the right film, with the right character using it, was worth more than almost any television advertising campaign money could buy.
By 1992, the phenomenon had become large enough that Mike Myers dedicated an extended scene in Wayne's World to satirising it — holding up a Pepsi can directly to the camera, biting into a Pizza Hut box, posing with Doritos and Reebok shoes, breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge exactly what was happening. The parody worked because the audience recognised the format immediately. In the decade since E.T., product placement had become so ubiquitous that a mainstream comedy could mock it and expect a mainstream audience to understand the joke. All of this traces back to a phone call that Mars did not take seriously enough.
What Happened to M&Ms
Mars and M&Ms survived the decision entirely intact. M&Ms remains one of the most globally recognised confectionery brands in the world, with marketing budgets and distribution networks that dwarf almost every other candy manufacturer. The decision not to appear in E.T. did not damage the brand in any measurable commercial sense.What it cost Mars was something harder to quantify: the specific cultural association between a candy and a film. Reese's Pieces does not merely have higher sales than it had before 1982. Reese's Pieces lives in cinema history. It is the candy that E.T. ate. Nobody who has seen the film forgets that detail — and because the film has been seen by hundreds of millions of people across four decades of releases, home video, DVD and streaming, the association renews itself with every new viewer. It is the kind of brand identity that cannot be bought after the fact. It was available for one million dollars in 1981 and Mars declined the meeting.
