Car stars take centre stage on film

'The Avengers' use of Acuras by Chris Evans and Robert Downey jnr gave Honda plenty of exposure. Photo / Supplied

Cars are often the stars of big-budget films. Sometimes movie-makers like to impress us with vehicles that are perfect for a particular character or plot development, or thrill audiences with an outlandish machine they might not have seen before and are not likely to see again.

Other times, they like to combine celluloid action with a good old-fashioned sales pitch, by partnering up with car companies to place the right car products centre-screen. It's called product placement - aka brands "joining forces" in marketing-speak - and it's becoming a fine art, with movie and new-car launch schedules often timed to coincide perfectly.

The effect can be all too obvious at times. If you hadn't heard of Honda's American luxury brand Acura before, you would be familiar with them after seeing the Marvel superhero movies Thor (2011) and The Avengers (2012).

Acura is the vehicle provider for the SHIELD organisation in the movie, and it's a big enough deal for the carmaker to have created a convertible concept car especially for the film.

But the real action is in glamorising the production cars that moviegoers can go and buy. The Avengers franchise is good at this kind of stuff. Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey jnr, drove an Audi R8 in the 2008 Iron Man movie.

By the time of the 2010 sequel, he was in an R8 Spyder - with the movie released virtually at the same time as the new car. Audi showed an Iron Man-themed television advertisement for the Spyder in America, during the lead-up to the launch of the car and movie.

General Motors got in even earlier with the Transformers movie in 2007: it supplied more than 200 vehicles to the production, the most important being the bright yellow Camaro that serves as Bumblebee. Although the Camaro had been unveiled in 2006, it didn't go into series production until 2009. But GM produced a Bumblebee special edition model straight away.

There are BMWs galore in the latest Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol movie (some might say too many) and the forthcoming i8 hybrid supercar even gets an outing, two years ahead of production.

The movie reboot of The Sweeney that went into production last year will feature the Ford Focus ST hot-hatch, with the release of the film and car coinciding in Britain.

The James Bond movie Casino Royale (2006) featured a Ford Mondeo well ahead of its official launch as part of a Ford product placement deal. The Bond franchise did the same with the BMW Z3 in Goldeneye (1995).

Or you might remember the Volvo C70 coupe in The Saint - both movie and car were launched in the first quarter of 1997.

Because a film is shot more than a year ahead of release, cars for on-screen action often aren't the real thing. Presumably you only get a glimpse of Acura RDX in The Avengers because it's not at production-ready stage. The Mondeo in Casino Royale was a driveable clay model.

That's the magic of movies ... and marketing.