Mac and Me

1988

Directed by Stewart Raffill

Welcome back to Movie Monday, where we’re systematically working our way down my personal list of the worst movies I’ve ever had the misfortune to sit through. Today we’ve reached number 51: Mac and Me, a 1988 science fiction disaster that proves sometimes the most offensive thing about a bad movie isn’t its terrible acting or nonsensical plot—it’s its shameless corporate pandering.

Now, as always, remember that this list is purely my opinion. What I consider cinematic torture, you might find oddly charming. But I’m willing to bet that after reading about this McDonald’s commercial disguised as a feature film, you’ll understand why it earned its spot on this inglorious countdown.

What Fresh Hell Is This?

Mac and Me tells the story of a “Mysterious Alien Creature” (yes, that’s what M.A.C. stands for—subtle, right?) who gets accidentally sucked up by a NASA probe and transported to Earth, where he befriends a wheelchair-using boy named Eric. Together, they search for Mac’s family while being pursued by government agents. If this sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve essentially just read the plot of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, except someone took Spielberg’s masterpiece and ran it through a corporate focus group until all the magic died.

The film stars Christine Ebersole as the single mother Janet, alongside child actors Jonathan Ward, Jade Calegory, Tina Caspary, and Lauren Stanley. Calegory, who has spina bifida and uses a wheelchair in real life, plays Eric—and to the filmmakers’ credit, casting an actually disabled actor was progressive for 1988. It’s just a shame they put him in such a spectacularly awful movie.

Directed by Stewart Raffill and produced with a $13 million budget, Mac and Me managed to gross only $6.4 million domestically, making it a certified box office bomb. But its financial failure is the least of its problems.

The Golden Arches of Shame

Let’s address the elephant in the room—or should I say, the Big Mac in the room. Mac and Me isn’t just a movie with product placement; it’s product placement with a movie reluctantly attached. Producer R.J. Louis had previously worked on McDonald’s advertising campaigns and saw an opportunity to create what he pitched as a “cross-promotional endeavor.” The result is a 99-minute McDonald’s commercial that occasionally remembers it’s supposed to have a plot.

The McDonald’s integration is so blatant it’s almost impressive in its audacity. There’s an extended dance sequence set in a McDonald’s restaurant featuring Ronald McDonald himself. Characters wear McDonald’s clothing throughout the film. The alien family is revived not by advanced medicine or alien technology, but by Coca-Cola. Yes, you read that correctly—Coca-Cola is literally a life-saving elixir in this universe.

The product placement became so notorious that film critic Chris Hicks declared he had never “seen a movie that is as crass a 90-minute commercial as Mac and Me.” When your film is primarily remembered as an advertisement rather than entertainment, you’ve crossed a line that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Making matters worse, despite McDonald’s specifically requesting that Ronald McDonald not appear in the film, he shows up anyway in that infamous dance sequence. It’s like the filmmakers were determined to make their corporate overlords cringe along with the rest of us.

E.T. Clone Home

But the shameless advertising is only half of what makes Mac and Me so offensive. The other half is its complete lack of originality. This isn’t just inspired by E.T.—it’s a wholesale theft of Spielberg’s story, characters, and emotional beats, executed with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face.

Los Angeles Times critic Michael Wilmington put it perfectly: Mac and Me is “an amazingly bald-faced copy of E.T., even though this is E.T. in a sticky wrapper, left under the heater two hours too long. Almost everything in the earlier movie has a double here.” The Washington Post’s Richard Harrington was even more cutting, suggesting the film could have been called “O.T. – The Other Terrestrial” and amending E.T.’s famous phrase to “E.T., call lawyer.”

The similarities aren’t subtle nods or homages—they’re direct lifts. Alien befriends lonely child? Check. Government agents hunt the alien? Check. Alien has special powers? Check. Emotional farewell scene? Check. The only significant difference is that where E.T. was a carefully crafted character that looked simultaneously ugly and adorable, Mac looks like what one critic described as “an overgrown, horrifically scarred fetus covered with blisters.”

A Master Class in Filmmaking Failure

Beyond the corporate shilling and shameless plagiarism, Mac and Me fails on virtually every technical and artistic level. The alien puppet is poorly manipulated and completely unconvincing—it doesn’t move so much as twitch randomly. The script is a mess of illogical plot points held together by McDonald’s visits. The pacing is atrocious, with long stretches of nothing happening punctuated by bizarre action sequences.

There’s a particularly notorious scene where Eric’s wheelchair goes out of control and he plunges down a hill into a lake—a sequence that’s simultaneously ridiculous and genuinely disturbing. Later, Eric is actually killed in a shootout (yes, really) before being magically revived by the aliens’ powers. These aren’t the kind of stakes you typically expect in a children’s movie, and they’re handled with all the emotional weight of a Happy Meal toy commercial.

The film’s 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes tells the story: critics were universal in their disdain. Gene Siskel gave it 1½ stars and noted the “truly frightening scenes” involving the wheelchair-bound child. The consensus was clear—this was a cynical cash grab that insulted audiences’ intelligence while traumatizing their children.

The One Good Thing to Come from This Mess

Ironically, the best thing about Mac and Me happened decades after its release, and it has nothing to do with the film itself. For years, whenever Paul Rudd appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien (and later Conan’s other shows), he would promise to show a clip from his latest project. Instead, he would always show the same scene from Mac and Me—Eric losing control of his wheelchair and tumbling into the lake.

This running gag became legendary among late-night TV fans. Rudd pulled the bait-and-switch when promoting everything from Friends to Ant-Man, turning one of cinema’s most embarrassing moments into comedy gold. He even managed to sneak the clip into Conan’s audio-only podcast in 2022, somehow making it work without visuals. The joke has given Mac and Me more cultural relevance than it ever earned on its own merits.

Rudd’s appreciation for the film’s “blatant” advertising and “unearned” emotional moments has helped cement Mac and Me as a “so bad it’s good” cult classic. Though let’s be honest—it’s really just bad.

The Verdict

Mac and Me represents everything wrong with 1980s Hollywood’s approach to children’s entertainment: the cynical belief that kids will watch anything as long as it features cute aliens and familiar fast food. It’s a film that combines shameless corporate advertising with lazy storytelling and incompetent filmmaking to create something that’s offensive on multiple levels.

The filmmakers behind this disaster had the audacity to end the movie with the text “We’ll be back!”—setting up a sequel that mercifully never materialized thanks to the film’s box office failure. Sometimes the universe gets it right.

While Mac and Me has found new life as an ironic cult classic and thanks to Paul Rudd’s comedic genius, that doesn’t make it any less of a failure as actual entertainment. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when corporate synergy completely overwhelms artistic vision—assuming there was any artistic vision to begin with.

At number 51 on my worst movies list, Mac and Me earns its place not just for being incompetently made, but for representing the absolute nadir of shameless commercial pandering. It’s a movie that exists not to tell a story or entertain audiences, but to sell Happy Meals and Coca-Cola. And somehow, it fails at even that modest goal.

Next week on Movie Monday: We’ll be diving into number 50 on the list with Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, where we’ll explore how a horror franchise can completely lose its way. Because apparently, even masked killers aren’t immune to terrible sequels.

What’s the most shameless example of product placement you’ve ever seen in a movie? Let me know in the comments below, and remember—at least it probably wasn’t as bad as aliens being brought back to life by Coca-Cola.