Cerveza Cristal is celebrated with Star Wars memes, despite legal trouble with LucasFilm

Instead of watching an ad break, viewers could watch A New Hope or The Empire Strikes Back uninterrupted on free-to-air Channel 13, but there was a catch. One moment, Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi tells a young Luke Skywalker about his father’s heroics and prepares to gift the young boy with his father’s lightsaber. In the next, he opens an old chest to reveal not a weapon of a seasoned warrior, but a cooler of ice-cold beer. There’s a disturbance in the Force, and the film: The Cerveza Cristal logo appears in the center of the screen, its catchy jingle ringing in the background.

At the time, the idea was hailed as “genius” by the judges for the Cannes International Advertising Festival, who awarded OMD Santiago, Cristal Beer’s ad agency at the time, the Grand Prix. But despite the acclaim, the clips, originally from 2003, faded into obscurity—until this week when they resurfaced on X:

Around 2003 in Chile, when the original trilogy of Star Wars began airing on television there, they did this funny thing to avoid cutting to commercial breaks. They stitched the commercials into the films themselves. Here is one of them, with the English dub added in. pic.twitter.com/wC7N2vPNvv

— Windy 🛸 (@heyitswindy) March 2, 2024

The site erupted with memes. Photoshops of Cerveza Cristal into famous movie franchises like Dune and Lord of the Rings proliferated across the site.

The free advertising for Cerveza Cristal via social media comes at a crucial time for Compañía de las Cervecerías Unidas, Cerveza Cristal’s parent company, which had a poor year, according to its fourth-quarter earnings report last month. Net income fell over 10% compared to 2022, and sales plummeted over 25% from 2022’s…