Can Product Placement in Movies break the 4th Wall?

Alrighty. I noticed when watching Red Planet the other day, that there is advertising on the suits worn by the ground crew that travels to the Martian Surface... enter image description here

In that shot, you can see Toshiba, GM, Nokia, and Hughes.

In Mission to Mars, you can see advertising on the ground vehicle... enter image description here

Now... I get the idea of advertising on sports figures/vehicles. The public are watching them, so you slap some logos on them to drive home brand recognition. However... the only people who would be seeing these logos in the universes detailed by these two movies, are the members of the crew on the ground on Mars. There are no public spectators to see this advertising.

If we look at it from the point of view of it being a movie, rather than being immersed in the story, then the advertising is for the people watching the movie... and ONLY for the people watching the movie. Wouldn't that be blatantly breaking the fourth wall?

fourth-wall product-placement

Best Answer

I think the only time you can say product placement legitimately breaks the 4th wall is if the movie is explicitly set in an alien world which is different from ours in such a way that the product couldn't exist.

The examples you posted are certainly distracting, unnecessary corporate greed, but both movies appear to be set in a near-future human setting in which those corporations exist just like their real-life counterparts, so I wouldn't say they count

I've had a look through the TVTropes listing of Product placement in movies but I actually haven't found any which are flat out impossible. Though some are quite improbable:

Budweiser Light survived the nuclear apocalypse before the founding of the Federation in Star Trek (2009) and is quite popular with the main characters.
The special glasses the Men in Black wear which prevent your mind getting wiped by their Neuralyzers are made by Ray-Ban. You'd think they'd need some kind of secret government mechanism in them to make it work, but no.

More arguable examples are movies set in the distant future where current products are still around, for example:

Everything Will Smith owns in i, Robot is product placement for products which are (from his perspective) 31 years out of date.
The only thing that dates the masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey are the product placements for companies which no longer existed by 2001 such as Bell Systems.
McDonalds is still around and exactly the same in 2263 in The Fifth Element.

What I'd consider a genuine fourth wall breaking product placement would be something like these fictional examples:

Han Solo ordering a Coca Cola in Star Wars (a galaxy far far away)
Terra in The Stranger (a planet on the same orbit as Earth at the other side of the Sun) being covered in Burger King billboards. _{*cough* Fantastic Four *cough*}
Rhetons in The Phantom Planet (tiny people who live on an asteroid) are Coo-coo for Coco Puffs.

I know that's not a lot of actual examples, but really it seems there aren't a whole lot of films about worlds which are very alien to us, and it probably has something to do with executives worrying that audiences won't be able to empathise with characters and settings which are so different from us.