Just about everywhere you looked in the summer of 1995, a pair of simian eyes stared back at you from the poster of Congo. Based on the best-selling Michael Crichton novel, Congo was billed as that year’s equivalent of Jurassic Park – another exciting creature feature with cutting-edge special effects and maybe just a tiny dash of horror.

“It’s a little like Alien at the beginning,” enthused director Frank Marshall, “in that it’s based in science fact, and like Indiana Jones at the end, with the lost city of Zinj.”

Determined to push Congo as a must-see summer film capable of competing with such rival pictures as Batman Forever and Disney’s Pocahontas, also out that year, Paramount launched an aggressive marketing campaign, reported at the time to be worth somewhere in the region of $12 million. Promotional tie-ins with Taco Bell and Pepsi pushed the advertising spend to about $97 million. As a result, Congo and its gorilla poster was on everything from bottles of cola to billboard posters to a new-fangled thing called the internet.

“You have to seem to be every place,” Paramount’s marketing boss Arthur Cohen told the Associated Press at the time. “You have to make the American public believe that they’re not good people if they don’t go to this movie.”