Since time immemorial, the machine of film merchandising has revealed plot particulars—or on the very least acquired individuals to wildly and often incorrectly speculate about them—nicely earlier than a film’s launch. So it’s maybe becoming then, that probably the most we’ve seen of Captain America: Brave New World up to now will not be in a trailer, or a fastidiously curated press reveal, however a quick meals tie-in almost a yr earlier than launch.
That’s because of McDonalds, which has began selling a brand new Blissful Meal toy marketing campaign that options characters from the next Captain America movie—inadvertently revealing, in chibi plush toy kind, our first have a look at a number of characters from the movie within the course of. Flip again now, lest the virgin eyes of your Marvel fandom be spoiled and rendered impure by the power of Ronald McDonald:
The promotion offers us a couple of appears to be like at characters past Sam Wilson himself, like Falcon and Winter Soldier’s Danny Ramirez as Joaquin Torres, the brand new Falcon—or the truth that the Crimson Hulk, the alter ego of Thaddeus Ross within the comics (now played by Harrison Ford, and the President of america in Courageous New World), will seem within the movie. There’s additionally two feminine characters included, however given the cutesified nature of the designs, it’s arduous to inform simply who they’re really meant to be—one among them may be the extremely politically fraught hero Israeli supersoldier, Sabra, who we all know is meant to appear in Courageous New World in some kind.
After all, this has a way more boring cause: Courageous New World was, initially, meant to be out next month earlier than it was reshuffled to August, after which to its February 2025 launch date in November last year. A film out within the subsequent month having a McDonald’s tie-in isn’t any huge shock, however when Courageous New World blinked, McDonald’s didn’t—presumably as a result of it has tie-ins and promotions teed up for motion pictures and reveals months and months and months upfront, and doesn’t have the time to reschedule or delay them. We’ve seen this in different methods not too long ago—Hasbro’s toys for Throughout the Spider-Verse released months before the movie did, because of its eight-month delay, giving us early appears to be like at character designs like Ben Reilly, the Scarlet Spider, and others. Hell, it’s occurred with Marvel and McDonalds earlier than—The Marvels’ last-minute push by even a couple of months final yr noticed its Blissful Meal toys debut a pair months upfront.
The act of promotion is such that we virtually at all times see fine details from a film on posters and cups and meals tie ins earlier than we see them in a trailer—or, heavens forbid, within the theater itself. That’s simply advertising, and most of the time, launch schedules for that form of branding are going to be nicely out of the arms of the studios at that time. That is the proper storm of two issues—Captain America’s sudden shift out of 2024 and the logistics of film promotion—smushing collectively to offer us the bizarre state of affairs of McDonalds dropping Marvel spoilers virtually a yr upfront.
Most of the time, it’s going to occur whatever the film—it’s simply that this time, it occurs to be in a very absurd method.
Need extra io9 information? Take a look at when to anticipate the newest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s subsequent for the DC Universe on film and TV, and all the things you might want to learn about the way forward for Doctor Who.