Another tangential thought on film credits and touts — hitching a movie’s prospects to the pedigree of its writers, producers or director is certainly nothing new. It’s almost as old as the movie business itself. But making fun of the filmmakers’ prior credits in self-effacing, post-modern fashion is becoming seemingly the latest trend in movie marketing.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer helped kickstart the development last year, with Date Movie, which was billed as “from two of the six writers of Scary Movie.” This was a canny realization of the opening paragraphs of any number of hack critical savagings, and a preemptive strike against the same. It took the piss out of the pooh-poohing, in other words; the film went on to gross almost $50 million Stateside and another $35 million abroad. Follow-up Epic Movie — a scatalogical recapitulation of scenes from other recent genre films, plus random digs at Paris Hilton and a rip-off of Saturday Night Live‘s “Lazy Sunday” sketch thrown in for good measure — opened atop the box office at $18.6 million last week, auguring good things for this trend of promotional self-mockery.

March’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, meanwhile, raises the bar even further. The trailer for the feature-length adaptation of the “Adult Swim” cartoon bills
itself as “from the first assistant director of the 2nd unit of Hellraiser
III: Hell on Earth.” It’s not bullshit, either. That would be co-writer-director Matt Maiellaro.