Published
In July 2016, Sausage Party’s second red-band trailer did something trailers rarely get to do: represent its film honestly. The film could not be advertised in polite cuts, and its campaign’s cheerful obscenity made a genuine piece of animation history. The file, including the sequel answer the searches keep asking for, follows.
The campaign that could only be red-band
Sausage Party’s premise (supermarket foods worship the “gods” who choose them, unaware of what kitchens are) is a theology joke built on gore-by-groceries, and the marketing problem was structural: any green-band cut lied about the product. Sony leaned into red-band instead, and the trailers (the first famously attached, by a projection error, to a Finding Dory screening, a parental incident the campaign happily absorbed) sold the transgression as the feature. It worked: the film opened far above projections for an R-rated cartoon and finished as the class’s all-time earner, made for a fraction of studio animation’s usual budgets.
The film behind the bit
Underneath the food profanity is a sturdier movie than the campaign suggested: Frank the sausage (Seth Rogen) as a supermarket Socrates, radicalizing aisle after aisle with the truth about the Great Beyond; Kristen Wiig’s Brenda wrestling faith against evidence; Edward Norton’s bagel and David Krumholtz’s lavash negotiating a Middle East of shelf space; Nick Kroll’s literal douche as villain. Reviews split between exhaustion and admiration, usually within the same paragraph, the consensus granting that a film this committed to its own worst idea achieves a kind of integrity. The post-release reporting on the animators’ uncompensated crunch remains the file’s sober footnote: the budget miracle had a bill, and workers paid part of it.
The sequel answer
“Sausage Party 2 trailer” searches have arrived at this page since 2016, and the resolved answer is television: Foodtopia, the 2024 Prime Video series, continued the story past the film’s uprising ending with the core voice cast, the theatrical sequel that was never announced turning out to be a streaming season instead. On this site’s ledgers that counts as the rare full resolution: the tracker files far more franchises that answered the sequel question with silence. The era’s other R-rated-marketing artifact in these files is Deadpool’s campaign, which ran the same insight — let the product’s actual voice do the advertising — six months earlier and changed studio marketing for both of them.