Ridley Scott’s Cinematic TV Commercials: An 80-Minute Compilation Spanning 1968-2023

“In the future, e‑mail will make the writ­ten word a thing of the past,” declares the nar­ra­tion of a 1999 tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial for Orange, the French tele­com giant. “In the future, we won’t have to trav­el; we’ll meet on video. In the future, we won’t need to play in the wind and rain; com­put­er games will pro­vide all the fun we need. And in the future, man won’t need woman, and woman won’t need man.” Not in our future, the voice has­tens to add, speak­ing for Orange’s cor­po­rate vision: a bit of irony to those of us watch­ing here in 2025, who could be for­giv­en for think­ing that the pre­dic­tions lead­ing up to it just about sum up the progress of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry so far. Nor will it sur­prise us to learn that the spot was direct­ed by Rid­ley Scott, that cin­e­mat­ic painter of dystopi­an sheen.

Bleak futures con­sti­tute just one part of Scot­t’s adver­tis­ing port­fo­lio. Watch above through the fea­ture-length com­pi­la­tion of his com­mer­cials (assem­bled by the YouTube chan­nel Shot, Drawn & Cut), and you’ll see dens of Croe­san wealth, deep-sea expe­di­tions, the trench­es of the Great War, the wastes of the Aus­tralian out­back, acts of Cold War espi­onage, a dance at a neon-lined nine­teen-fifties din­er, and the arrival of space aliens in small-town Amer­i­ca — who turn out just to be stop­ping by for a Pep­si.

Not that Scott is a brand loy­al­ist: that he did a good deal of work for Amer­i­ca’s sec­ond-biggest soda brand, some of them not just Mia­mi Vice-themed but star­ring Don John­son him­self, did­n’t stop him from also direct­ing a Coca-Cola spot fea­tur­ing Max Head­room. The decade was, of course, the nine­teen eight­ies, at the begin­ning of which Scott made his most endur­ing mark as a visu­al styl­ist with Blade Run­ner.

A series of spots for Bar­clays bank (whose indict­ments of com­put­er­ized ser­vice now seem pre­scient about our fast-approach­ing AI-“assisted” real­i­ty) hew so close­ly to the Blade Run­ner aes­thet­ic that they might as well have been part of the same pro­duc­tion. But of Scot­t’s dystopi­an adver­tise­ments, none are more cel­e­brat­ed than the Super Bowl spec­ta­cle for the Apple Mac­in­tosh in which a ham­mer-throw­er smash­es a Nine­teen Eighty-Four-style dic­ta­tor-on-video. The com­pi­la­tion also includes a less wide­ly remem­bered com­mer­cial for the Mac­in­tosh’s tech­ni­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive but com­mer­cial­ly failed pre­de­ces­sor, the Apple Lisa. So asso­ci­at­ed did Scott become with cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy that it’s easy to for­get that he rose up through the adver­tis­ing world of his native Britain by mak­ing big impacts, over and over, for down­right quaint brands: Hov­is bread, McDougal­l’s pas­try mix, Find­us frozen fish pies.

It may seem a con­tra­dic­tion that Scott, long prac­ti­cal­ly syn­ony­mous with the large-scale Hol­ly­wood genre block­buster, would have start­ed out by craft­ing such nos­tal­gia-suf­fused minia­tures. And it would take an inat­ten­tive view­er indeed not to note that the man who over­saw the defin­i­tive cin­e­mat­ic vision of a men­ac­ing Asia-inflect­ed urban dystopia would go on to make com­mer­cials for the Sony Mini­Disc and the Nis­san 300ZX. It all makes more sense if you take Scot­t’s artis­tic inter­ests as hav­ing less to do with cul­ture and more to do with bureau­cra­cy, archi­tec­ture, machin­ery, and oth­er such sys­tems in which human­i­ty is con­tained: so nat­ur­al a fit for the realm of adver­tis­ing that it’s almost a sur­prise he’s made fea­tures at all. And indeed, he con­tin­ues to do ad work, bring­ing movie-like grandeur to mul­ti-minute pro­mo­tions for brands like Hen­nessy and Turk­ish Air­lines — each one intro­duced as “a Rid­ley Scott film.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Rid­ley Scott Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­board­ing (and How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Project)

See Rid­ley Scott’s 1973 Bread Com­mer­cial — Vot­ed England’s Favorite Adver­tise­ment of All Time

Watch Rid­ley Scott’s Con­tro­ver­sial Nis­san Sports Car Ad That Aired Only Once, Dur­ing the Super Bowl (1990)

Rid­ley Scott on the Mak­ing of Apple’s Icon­ic “1984” Com­mer­cial, Aired on Super Bowl Sun­day in 1984

Watch The Jour­ney, the New Rid­ley Scott Short Film Teased Dur­ing the Super Bowl

Rid­ley Scott Walks You Through His Favorite Scene from Blade Run­ner

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.