‘Captain America’ star hunks it up in Chinese Call of Duty: Online trailer

Activision is working with megacorporation Tencent to bring Call of Duty to gamers in China, and now the two companies have enlisted the help of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars to promote the shooter.

Chris Evans, star of Marvel’s Captain America and Avengers movies, takes the leading role in a new advertisement for Call of Duty: Online, which is the China-only free-to-play version of the publisher’s long-running military-action franchise. One of Tencent’s other online shooters in China has already made billions of dollars, and Activision is hoping Call of Duty will do the same. The live-action trailer features four regular people who leave work and immediately jump into the world of Call of Duty: Online. When they run into a situation they cannot handle, that’s when Evans steps in to take care of the enemies. It’s basically the plot of Dances with Wolves.

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Call of Duty: Online debuted as a beta test in China last January, and Tencent has worked to consistently update the game for fans. The latest content patch for the shooter adds a new cooperative mode where players work together to fight off waves of zombies, and that’s the kind of action that the Evans commercial focuses on.

Check it out:

One of the things that is interesting about this promotion for Call of Duty: Online is just how similar it is to the trailers Activision makes for its Western Call of Duty releases. The publisher has released a large-scale live-action advertisement featuring Hollywood action stars like Robert Downey Jr., Sam Worthington, or Taylor Kitsch for every major Call of Duty over the last several years. By doing the same thing for Call of Duty: Online, Tencent and Activision are saying to gamers in China that this is another real entry in this series.

Call of Duty: Online is an important game for Activision. The game is going after the same audience as Tencent’s hyperpopular Crossfire free-to-play shooter, which made close to $1 billion each of the last two years. With that kind of potential, it makes sense that Activision and Tencent would happily spend the money on a big-budget commercial.

Check out the video below for a clip of the new Call of Duty: Online mode in action, and see how it compares to recent Western Call of Duty releases: