Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) is the Greatest Pepsi Commercial of All Time

A thing that most people don’t realize is that a lot of movies are actually just very long Pepsi commercials. And the late 80s/early 90s were undoubtedly the heyday of Pepsi commercials disguised as movies.

Home Alone is a very good Pepsi commercial, mostly because there’s a child character who wets the bed if he drinks Pepsi (which is, I have to say, an odd selling point).¹ George Clooney’s infamous scene in Return of the Killer Tomatoes is a Pepsi commercial that sorta breaks the fourth wall, though it is also a commercial for many other products (as well as the Screen Actors Guild). Cobra is perhaps the most gratuitous Pepsi commercial as Stallone has not one but two standoffs in front of Pepsi signs. And Wayne’s World is perhaps the most memorable Pepsi commercial because it’s a self-aware moment of comedy, laughing at itself while still cutting the check.

But the best longform Pepsi advertisement is Terminator 2: Judgment Day. And for more reasons than you might think.

The first reason, obviously, is that there are Pepsi product placements scattered throughout the film. A lot of product placement. When Arnold’s Terminator character warps to 1995 and whoops a gang of hooligans at a biker bar (while naked), there’s a neon Pepsi sign behind the bar. (When’s the last time you saw a soda sign at a bar, let alone a biker bar?) When the heroes stop for gas on their Mexican excursion, there are Pepsi ads outside of Cactus Jack’s Market. There are even a couple of characters seen drinking Pepsi: a mall security guard and a systems engineer at Miles’ laboratory.

But Pepsi is too smart to settle for sips from a can. One can of Pepsi isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A refrigerated box full of cans. That’s why you can see not one but two Pepsi vending machines in Terminator 2: one at the aforementioned shopping mall and one at the state hospital where Sarah Connor is being imprisoned.

This is where things get interesting. Because you know what a vending machine is? It’s a machine, man.² And this is a franchise about a war between humans and machines. It’s not a stretch to say that Americans have been at war with unhealthy beverages, am I right? It’s in our nature to destroy ourselves, folks. (Major drag, huh.)

There’s no turning back now, reader, so let’s dig deeper.

Though Pepsi’s individual taglines and jingles varied throughout the 80s and 90s, the focus of their branding was always on generations. They claimed Pepsi was the beverage of “a new generation” or “generation next” or whatever. By scattering their logo throughout Terminator 2, I believe Pepsi is making a very clear mission statement: The human race will go extinct and the “new generation” will be a generation of machines. Consider that the Millennial generation ends in 1996 and Generation Z begins in 1997.³ You know what else happened in 1997? The aforementioned Judgment Day, that’s what. 

Pepsi does offer a ray of hope, though. Humans can win the war with the machines if, as Ray Charles sings in a Diet Pepsi ad that ran all throughout 1991, “[we’ve] got the right one, baby.” (When he says “the right one,” he is referring to John Connor, obviously.)

Perhaps you cannot buy into my conspiracy theory and you think I’m a crackpot. That’s okay. Because I have one more piece of irrefutable evidence to present.

There are several brands featured in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, of course. Subway and Miller are the two other notable products. But, as you can imagine, there are no other soda products to be found. This is a world where Pepsi is all they’ve got.

This is notable because the first Terminator film is the exact opposite: It’s a Coke commercial. It’s got Coca-Cola signage, a Coke vending machine, a Sprite can, even a neon sign from McDonald’s, one of their most prominent business partners. Our world, as presented in The Terminator, is a world of Coke, and as we see in Terminator 2, the machines have replaced Coke with Pepsi, just as they replaced our species.

Still think I’m a crackpot? Have you considered that the T-1000 looks a lot like Crystal Pepsi in its liquid metal form? Which was a product released in 1992, one year after Terminator 2? I could do this all day.⁴

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is now streaming on Paramount+, it’s available to rent elsewhere.

1. VHS and DVD copies of Home Alone featured a Pepsi commercial among the opening trailers, which seems like a better marketing strategy.

2. I mean, the next sequel is called Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, ain’t it? (I have not seen it, but I assume a sentient vending machine kills a person at some point.)

3. Before you try to tell me these parameters aren’t accurate, I checked with the Pew Research Center. Take it up with them, nerds.

4. No really, I could. You know what else Pepsi did in 1992? They released a new can design where the word “Pepsi” was removed and separated from the iconic globe logo. Just as the machines removed humans from the face of the earth. I will not be silenced.