Kitchen conflict - exemplified in popular shows such as The Bear and Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen - is nothing new. What is new, is a chain restaurant deploying AI video to quite openly diss a chain restaurant rival.
And so, this week's Video of the Week encounters an extraordinary attempted takedown of McDonald's by chicken shop Popeyes. For those that haven't ventured out of the house in 2026, you may not have noticed the explosion of chicken outlets on your High Street. Alongside the even-more-prevalent KFCs we now have Slim Chickens, Wingstop, Dave's Hot Chicken (go Dave), Chicken Cottage, Dixy Chicken and Chickaros. Frankly, most of it's pretty fowl (ahem).
The trigger for this outpouring of dedicated disrespecting was McDonald's bringing back its Snack Wrap - a day after Popeyes launched its own chicken wraps - a feud that first boiled over last summer and has been simmering nicely ever since. Whilst there's no contest in size - Maccy's has 45k restaurants across the world (1,500 in the UK) and Popeyes has 5,000 (100 in UK) - the contest for the predominantly younger audience that prefers spicy chicken nuggets is hotting up.
The video is made with Google's Veo 3 which is decent though not quite Seedance 2.5 (or even 2.0). The clown representing Ronald McDonald doing some apparently obscene things in the kitchen is suitably grotesque. The actual music and rapping is strong and, from its TikTok trending, seems to have had the desired impact.
So no doubt there will be a lot more of these drive-by diss tracks looking to dunk on rival poultry enterprises. Plenty of feathers ruffled, pecking orders challenged and other awful puns that I've been trying not to use in this blog so far, before the chickens - yes - finally come home to roost.
🐓 😇