Burger King Trolls McDonald’s With a Hilarious Ad at Screenings of ‘It’

It’s not just the usual competition between two fast-food chains, because this time, Stephen King and his favorite evil clown are involved.

It, a reboot of King’s 1986 novel about a deadly jester, has been breaking box office records around the world thanks to its certified classic status and some brilliant guerrilla marketing involving super-creepy balloons tied to grates.

Burger King Russia even filed an official complaint demanding the government pull the movie from theaters because—get this—its villain Pennywise looks too much like one Ronald McDonald.

Hamburg, Germany-based agency Grabarz & Partner saw this as an opportunity, turning an area preview of the film into “the longest advertisement Burger King ever had.”

That was quite amusing, and the viewers in Hamburg seemed to be very much in on the joke. The fact that none of them were budding 10-year-old horror fans terrified by the very mention of Pennywise probably had something to do with it.

We’re still puzzled by the idea that the film’s popularity would somehow give McDonald’s an unfair advantage over its chief rival in Russia, but there you go.

On that note, we can also say with confidence that neither Grabarz & Partner nor its client were responsible for a far more horrific incident in which a group of presumably drunk men in Ronald McDonald costumes barged into a Minehead, England Burger King shouting “You’re shit and you know you are” and refused to leave.