Julienne Schaer for NYC & Company
Spike Jonze, the director of “Where the Wild Things Are,” speaking to schoolchildren during a movie promotion.

THE American release of “Broken Embraces,” the new film by the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, was heralded by an unexpected product: a limited-edition series of espresso cups that Mr. Almodóvar designed for Illycaffè, the Italian coffee company.

Each of the seven cups in the series is decorated with images that evoke one of his films, including “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “Volver” and “Broken Embraces,” which is from Sony Pictures Classics. But the marketing of the film, which opened in theaters last month and stars Penélope Cruz, has had little relation to the coffee cups.

“It’s not intentional to promote the film,” Illycaffè’s chief executive, Andrea Illy, said by telephone from Rome. He said, modestly, that the company did not “have the power to promote an Almodóvar film. It’s more probably the Almodóvar film that promotes Illy coffee.”

The partnership puts a new twist on the Happy Meal model of film marketing, with two powerful brands joined together to cross-promote their products, with some film marketing diverging into unexpected realms. This fall and winter, movie studios are running some creative promotions involving museum exhibits, video games and, yes, McDonald’s Happy Meals.

The Hollywood studios have long sought partners to help market their films, but as advertising and marketing budgets have been strained by the downturn and profits have sagged, they have grown even more eager to hitch their movies to potentially talked-about products, and vice versa. Happy Meals are tied to the recent animated film “Astro Boy,” but some less prominent and artier films have found an array of product tie-ins.

Aiming for blanket coverage, two films this season — “Where the Wild Things Are,” from Warner Brothers, and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” from Summit Entertainment — have teamed with multiple brands.

Studios are reluctant to discuss these partnerships, preferring that such promotions speak for themselves. A spokeswoman for Universal Pictures, which did a tie-in between its recent comedy “Couples Retreat,” starring Vince Vaughn, and the Activision video game Guitar Hero, declined to comment, stating that the studio did not discuss its marketing plans. Warner Brothers and Summit also declined to comment.

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