Marvel‘s promotional engine for “Captain America: The First Avenger” is beginning to kick into high gear with a new poster, and the implication that this film is also serving as an advertisement for 2012’s “The Avengers.” How else to explain the complete absence of Captain America’s name in favor of the “Avenge” tagline? Marvel’s been gunshy about using ‘America’ in conjunction with the marketing, but, c’mon, this is a seventy year old character that remains popular today. Given what we know of the plot – Cap and Bucky teaming to stop the Red Skull from retrieving the magical Cosmic Cube – what exactly is being avenged?
It’s a nice piece of artwork, but we’re not sure how successful it is in conveying what this movie is. First off, the whole superhero-with-downtrodden-look thing has been done to death, especially considering none of these movies are really tragedies per se (though a superhero version of “Ordinary People” would be kinda great). Secondly, the dark color scheme and flying debris (shrapnel?) doesn’t make this look like something families will want to go to, which is weird, because Captain America is fun stuff, and not deeply serious hardcore war theatrics. And we’re a broken record here, but would it have killed them to use a real photo? This looks like a highly-textured snapshot from a videogame. Aesthetically pleasing, but we do see the average filmgoer absentmindedly passing this by in the lobby.
The trailer for “Captain America: The First Avenger” will debut during the Super Bowl on Sunday night, while Cap will avenge… something… on July 22nd.
