Forget Star Wars and Harry Potter, the latest Hollywood mega-franchise is coffee, with Julia Roberts the latest A-list star to sign up to sell the gleaming coffee machines that are increasingly big business in the UK.
The star has just collected a hefty fee - rumoured to be $1.5m (pounds 950,000) - to appear in an advert for Lavazza's A Modo Mio coffee machine. Italian for "my way", the gadget is the coffee house's answer to the might of Nestle's Nespresso, as it tries to cash in on the booming demand for so-called "pod" or "cartridge" coffee machines.
In the Lavazza ad, to be shown in Italy over Christmas, Roberts is dressed as Botticelli's Venus and does not even speak. But her famously toothy smile is now pitted against "gorgeous" George Clooney, whose endorsement of Nespresso has helped turn it into one of Nestle's "billionaire" brands, with sales of pounds 1.8bn last year. Neither campaign will be aired in the actors' native US.
Nespresso says it has 7 million club members globally - people who take regular deliveries of the individual aluminium capsules to make an espresso, latte or cappuccino at home, a trend that has been described by one critic as "consumerism gone mad".
The UK is still a nation of tea drinkers but the advent and rapid growth of branded coffee chains has made consumers increasingly "coffee-savvy", according to a recent study by the research firm Mintel.
"The pods and cartridges sector has boomed over the last decade on the back of its ability to merge the convenience of instant coffee, with the quality of taste associated with ground," says Ben Perkins, head of food and drink research at Mintel.
Perkins says the trend has been amplified by consumers' desire to save money during the recession as they try to replicate coffee shop drinks at in-home prices. The market has also been given a boost by falling prices, with the average cost of a machine down by 30% on last year.
Mintel figures show UK coffee sales increased 17% between 2005 and 2009 to nearly pounds 800m. However, much of that is down to the rising price of coffee beans in the international trading market. The amount of instant coffee sold has flattened and the number of its drinkers is in decline. Sales of espresso machines, meanwhile, increased by 22% last year.
Analysts say consumers like pods because they promise a consistency of taste and coffee shop-style products such as caramel macchiato at the push of a button, although not all coffee aficionados agree that, minus the barista, the results are the same. The business model is akin to the printer market, where you buy the kit once but are hooked on the ink for life. Once the machine is bought, consumers are railroaded in a particular direction - Nespresso machines, for example, only work with Nespresso capsules.
The lucrative niche has led to a technological arms race to create the most seductively shaped and coloured coffee-makers. Nespresso licenses its brand to manufacturers including Krups and Magimix, making the bulk of its revenue from the sale of the coffee capsules, while the US multinational Kraft - which is the UK market leader with its Tassimo brand - does its R&D in a top-secret building attached to its Kenco plant in Banbury, Oxfordshire.
It has filed 42 patents for Tassimo and has a "whole stack of machines in the pipeline", it says. Even the cartridges, called t-discs, are hi-tech - using science borrowed from the work of Formula One engineers on fluid dynamics. Its appeal will be boosted next year by new flavours following Kraft's acquisition of Cadbury.
Perkins says the falling price of machines has given the pods and cartridges sector a major boost even though the systems are at odds with the industry's initiatives to reduce packaging waste. "Although real connoisseurs of coffee are not yet won over by the taste of the product - and the individual packaging is actually at odds with the kind of environmental gains that most other industries are trying to promote - the majority of coffee roasting brands now have their own range of pods because they have become so important to the industry."
The Nespresso 'pods' are only compatible with its coffee machines, ensuring a lifetime of follow-on sales