Ten years ago, Captain America: Civil War was released in theaters, and I’m still thinking about the time Marvel PR trapped the cast in a hotel for an improv exercise. If we’re going to celebrate the tin/aluminum anniversary of the film, we must also pay homage to the chaos that was the Shorty Award-winning “Choose Your Team” Captain America: Civil War promotional campaign.
On April 11, 2016 the official X (it was Twitter then…) account for Captain America tweeted a call to action in advance of Captain America: Civil War‘s release. They asked fans to officially pick a side, #TeamCap or #TeamIronMan, in order to receive a “personalized” message from the cast. “The time is now,” the original tweet read, “Let the world know who you stand with. You never know who’s listening.”
Little did we know that they’d forced Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Elizabeth Olsen, Chris Evans, Chadwick Boseman, Paul Rudd, and Paul Bettany to actually record messages either congratulating or roasting people by name for their choice of team. In retrospect, it’s wild they didn’t have Tom Holland do these. He would have killed it! Participants instantly received a reply that said “Are you sure you made the right choice? Find out in theaters.” followed by a video in which one of the cast members spoke, seemingly, directly to them. According to the social media agency McBeard, they generated 1108 individual responses.
The ‘Civil War’ campaign ironically brought people together.
Even though the exercise was designed to divide people into teams, it created a sense of community. The rollout was genius, but also a little bit messy IMHO. Obviously they could not record a message for every single first name in the world. Some folks got a “broad response” from one of the cast members. Sometimes those generic messages had a name banner in the lower third. Sometimes not!
But they did try. If you watch through a playlist compilation on YouTube you can see how many names they tried to anticipate. I highly suggest that you do. It’s incredibly funny to watch these actors go slowly insane. They had to come up with new ways to say the same thing. “We should all go camping,” suggested Rudd. “You need a life coach because you’re making bad decisions,” scolded Mackie.
“Julia,” sighed Stan. “Julia, Julia… a name I will forget in about 30 seconds. Have fun on Team Iron Man.” The (former) Winter Soldier actor seemed especially committed to saying something different every time. Sometimes that meant flirting with imaginary people with incredibly game like “Andrea, thank you so much for picking Team Cap; I’m going to come outside of your house, apartment, or village and hold a big boom box over my head and tell you that I love you.” Other times, it meant insulting them with cutting words like “why don’t you go and eat a hot dog with your best friend Robert Downey Jr.”
It was fun! It got people excited about the plot of Captain America: Civil War and gave us something to think about. Let’s get more stuff like this on press tours again, instead of TikTok memes, lie-detector tests and eating chicken that may/may not be spicy. No disrespect to any of those things! But it is fun when promo for a movie gets you excited about more than just the people who are in it.
(featured image: Marvel Studios)
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