Reprisal is a 2018 movie starring Bruce Willis that has been almost universally panned for its low quality, which even includes using online tools to generate part of its set and then leaving a watermark in plain sight for anyone to catch.
This is exactly what happened to us as we noticed the watermark in a review on YouTube by Ralph Sepe (better known as ralphthemoviemaker). At about 12:08 in the video a printout of a news report is pinned to a board and, in the corner, it reads “breakyourownnews.com“.
This website is a tool which allows you to generate a fictional news bulletin complete with your own headline, excerpt and image. Even without the watermark it was easy to recognise the layout as it’s been used countless times over the years to make joke images and memes.
Look, we even made one ourselves and tweeted it at Sepe:
@ralphsepe in your video on Reprisal there's a shot of a printed news segment, which was created using a free online tool.
The watermark "https://t.co/7ePCRNDJV2" can be seen in the top right because they didn't bother to remove it pic.twitter.com/WMgNimkake— Clint Matos (@Clint_Matos) April 29, 2019
The creator of the site – Jonathan Cresswell – saw our tweet and pointed out that several others had made the connection too, another testament to the fact that the tool is so recognisable.
“Um so it turns out my dumb Break Your Own News site is in a [f*cking] Bruce Willis movie,” Cresswell tweeted, “I’m not entirely sure what to do with this information”.
And to that end neither do we. The website is rather bare bones and doesn’t mention anything about Creative Commons or commercial use. We’ll have to leave it to a lawyer to see if the film makers of Reprisal did anything wrong here, at least in terms of the law.
Regardless of legality, it’s just bizarre that someone on the Reprisal crew found this tool, printed out the result and stuck it in a movie with Willis. With very little people knowing about the movie, Sepe made a video about where we found it, and this lead to Cresswell seeing it too.
