[Ed. Note: I just want to welcome Dan Riehl to Big Hollywood. If I have anything to say about it, you’ll be seeing a lot more of him . — JN]
Depending upon your age, you might remember charging up a hill, air gun, not air guitar, in hand – there may even have been a friend at your side. But there was an enemy out there somewhere in front of you and you, soldier, were going to take him out.
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Does that gut wrenching, rock American-hard, instinct still exist today? Initial sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops suggests it does.
Call of Duty: Black Ops destroyed previous video-game sales records, ringing up an unprecedented $650 million in retail sales within five days of release, according to Activision Blizzard Inc. More than half of the game’s take, about $360 million, occurred on Nov. 9, its first day out.
What’s going on here? This can’t be right! Don’t these people know anything? Don’t they … watch movies, for heaven’s sake? No one should be down for this type of thing. Where is the moral equivalence? How can the only greeninvolved be some male, or female, grunt’s digitalized fatigues? Quick, someone call the thought police!!
The television ad accompanying the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops opens with a woman in a suit walking through a war zone and blasting away with an automatic rifle. Over the next 60 seconds it shows adults from all walks off life – a university student, a balding concierge, a uniformed short order cook – smiling broadly and firing rocket launchers, shotguns, and pistols at one another. It ends with a bold and potentially controversial statement: “There’s a soldier in all of us.”
Never mind. They’re here. Enter Skip Bayless of ESPN. Dude! Do you kiss your Mother with that tongue, or just cluck it when some sports star, or maybe even an entertainer, does something not so PC? And I don’t mean PC, as opposed to PlayStation, or for the Wii. “Call of Duty: Black Ops” made $650 million in the first five days. That’s only 3 or more times what your average successful Hollywood film might bring in 5 days. One can only imagine how well it might have done were it in 3-D.
Kobe Bryant: C’mon Man, Why Is He Being Scrutinized for Being in a Commercial
Recently I went out and got Call of Duty Black Ops for Playstation 3. It’s a great shoot em up game and one of the best in the series. Then while watching a Lakers game a few days ago, I saw my favorite player, Kobe Bryant, wielding a gun and playing a live edition of Call of Duty. I thought it was cool.
The message of the commercial is that there’s a soldier in all of us. … You can have fun with the soldier in you. Take a little time out of your day, (or a lot) and enjoy pleasing the soldier in you. That’s the message of the commercial.
Then I was watching ESPN First Take and saw Skip Bayless arguing that it was dumb for Kobe to take part in the commercial, smiling and shooting a machine gun. Really?
Build it and they will come? Perhaps. But burn it down, blow it up, or, you know, just flat-out kill it, as in the enemy, and they might come out even more? Unfortunately, with Hollywood seemingly unable to distinguish who the enemy is, we may not ever know the answer to that $64,000 question. The game is rigged. The board tilts Left. But never fear, my friends. With Big Hollywood on the scene and now, a hot new Call of Duty Black Ops release, it’s game on. And whether they like it that Kobe suited up, or not, is irrelevant. And they wonder why so many Americans says the same thing about Hollywood!
A video game developed in the US that challenges players to assassinate former Cuban president Fidel Castro has provoked an angry response from Cuba. Call of Duty: Black Ops, which went on sale in the UK this week, is set during the cold war, with gamers taking on the role of a special operative as he saves the US from a communist plot, travelling between Cuba, Vietnam and Russia.
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