I don’t think many of you—if any at all—care about video games, but I’m pretty sure that some of you do care about Beardy Chris Evans, so here is something for those of us who are into Beardy Chris Evans (and the two of us who like video games): Evans stars in the new ad campaign for Call of Duty Online. Gaming consoles have been banned in China since 2000, and though they’re now available in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, game developers continue to make online versions of games for the lucrative Chinese market...
Just like Hollywood continues to grovel for its share of the expanding Chinese box office. We used to call celebrities doing commercials in Asia “Japandering”, but now it’s more like pandapandering. Only thirty-three foreign films a year are screened in China and competition for those spots is fierce; Marvel likes getting each of their annual movies into two of those slots. And Evans’s Captain America is very popular there—last spring Captain America: The Winter Soldier grossed over $100 million in China. After such a strong showing, Evans has made a couple trips to China this year, once for a charity golf tournament and now for the COD commercial. So coincidence or conspiracy time: Chris Evans really likes China or Marvel is facilitating opportunities for him to cement his, and by extension Captain America’s, popularity there.
Anyway, back to the part you care about—Beardy Chris Evans looking super hot. He goes up a man-level with facial hair, and I also approve of the maximum gun show he has going on. Evans complains a lot about the Captain America fitness regimen, but he’s several months between projects and doesn’t seem to have lost much mass at all, so he must not mind it THAT much.
He’s not the first Avenger to shill for Call of Duty—RDJ did it in 2012—but the tantalizing thing about Evans doing this is it’s a brief glimpse of what an R-rated Captain America movie might look like. We’ll never, ever see that for real, but man I’d like to visit the alternate timeline where Marvel is making R-rated movies. It also makes me wonder how long before we start hearing about a live-action COD movie happening. I have a feeling if Michael Fassbender can make Assassin’s Creed work we’re going to see a flurry of video game adaptations.
