Absolut – Mulit

A Bollywood spoof. A bottle-shaped mystery. The hair origin story no one saw coming.

Before BMW Films rewrote the branded entertainment playbook, Absolut Pictures was quietly reinventing cinema advertising. From 2000–2003, Absolut, then the leading vodka brand globally, launched a groundbreaking integrated cinema campaign featuring spoof trailers for fictional films, each filled with hidden Absolut bottle silhouettes. These trailers ran ahead of blockbuster movies, paired with matching print ads designed like movie posters in top magazines. Fans scoured the frames like detectives, hunting the bottle cameos, and documenting their finds in early online fan forums.

Each film was helmed by a top director:

• Beat Crazy – Tarsem Singh

• Good Morning Mr. Grubner – Tom DiCillo

• Farewell Casanova – Spike Lee

But for the fourth installment, we did something unexpected: We made the actual movie.

IMDb as Mulit (Short 2003) — a 12‑minute short from India.

Absolut Mulit – The Origin of the Mullet (sort of)

Mulit is a 12-minute Bollywood film that tells the (entirely fabricated) origin story of the mullet haircut—an epic of fate, love, and follicular drama. Shot on location across Mumbai and Jaipur over 9 days and directed by Ivan Zacharias, the film pays homage to classic Bollywood tropes while layering in winks to Absolut’s visual identity throughout the story.

In contrast to the prior trailers, Mulit was designed as a fully immersive film experience: part parody, part cinematic tribute, part bottle hunt. The production was vibrant, eccentric, and joyfully over-the-top—a perfect mirror of the Absolut brand’s creative spirit at the time.

It remains the most ambitious and beloved executions in the campaign, and a precursor to the modern era of branded short films, and still my favorite project of all time.