Since time immemorial, the machine of movie merchandising has revealed plot details—or at least made people do so wild and often wrong Speculate about it – long before a film is released. Then perhaps it’s fitting that we’ve seen most of it Captain America: Brave New World So far it’s not a trailer or a carefully curated press reveal, but rather a fast food post almost a year before release.
That’s thanks to McDonald’s, which has begun promoting a new Happy Meal toy campaign featuring characters from 2019 next Captain America Movie– inadvertently revealing our first look at several characters from the film in the form of a chibi plushie. Repent now, lest the virgin eyes of your Marvel fandom be spoiled and impure Power of Ronald McDonald:
The promotion gives us a few glimpses of characters beyond Sam Wilson himself Falcon and Winter Soldieris Danny Ramirez as Joaquin Torresthe new Falcon – or the fact that the Red Hulk, the alter ego of Thaddeus Ross in the comics (now played by Harrison Fordand the President of the United States in Beautiful new world), will appear in the film. There are also two female characters included, but given the cuteness of the designs, it’s hard to say who they’re actually supposed to be – one of them could be the incredibly politically engaged Israeli super soldier Sabra, which we know she is should appear In Beautiful new world in any form.
Of course there is a much more boring reason for this: Beautiful new world was originally supposed to be like this will be published next month before it was pushed back to August and then to its February 2025 release date November last year. It’s no big surprise that a McDonald’s-themed movie is coming out next month, but when Beautiful new world McDonald’s blinked, but didn’t – presumably because the company has planned tie-ins and promotions for movies and shows months and months in advance and doesn’t have time to postpone or reschedule them. We’ve seen this in other ways lately – with Hasbro’s toys for Across the Spider-Verse RPublished months earlier The film made it, thanks to him eight month delayand gives us our first glimpses of character designs like Ben Reilly, the Scarlet Spider and others. Damn, this has happened before at Marvel and McDonalds –The wondersLast year, when the company was delayed just a few months at the last minute, the Happy Meal toy debuted a few months in advance.
The act of advertising is such that we almost always see snippets of a film on posters, mugs and food supplements before we see them in a trailer – or, God forbid, in the cinema itself. That’s just marketing, and in most cases In some cases, release plans for this type of branding are no longer in the control of the studios at this point. This is the perfect storm of two things:Captain AmericaThe sudden change from 2024 and the logistics of film promotion – thrown together to give us the strange scenario of McDonald’s releasing Marvel spoilers almost a year in advance.
Most of the time it happens regardless of the film – only this time it happened in a particularly absurd way.
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