The “bonkers COVID-19 conspiracy theories” bubble has seen people claiming that the events of 2020 was all foreshadowed years ago by things like Tangled, Space Jam, the Spider-Man PS4 game, and of course, The Simpsons. This is all ridiculous of course but that won’t stop us from sharing what must be the most hilariously ridiculous COVID-19 conspiracy yet: a Captain America: The First Avenger scene apparently predicted the coronavirus pandemic way back in 2011.
Speaking of COVID-19, the GOAT team talks about post-coronavirus lockdown life on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
The Captain America: The First Avenger scene at the centre of this bonkers COVID-19 conspiracy takes place at the end of the film where Steve Rogers awakens from his icy nap and runs out into Times Square.
There’s nothing really remote suss about the scene to be honest. Unless you’re a conspiracy theorist, in which case this ending scene of Captain America totally predicted the coronavirus pandemic way back in 2011.
This whole theory began when William Mullally tweeted out a caption-filled screengrab from “a friend who is fully into the COVID conspiracies … that says Captain America predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 2011.”
What follows is a wild Twitter thread that encompasses all the feverish over-thinking of small details and coming to grand conclusions based on nothing. It’s all complete nonsense of course, but this Captain America coronavirus pandemic conspiracy theory gets points for being, well, hilarious.
This insane journey begins by pointing out the Times Square billboard for Corona beer on one side of Chris Evans and a second billboard that looks suspiciously like a microscopic image of the coronavirus on the other. Pure coincidence of course but let’s just roll with it for the sake of this rollercoaster.
Somehow this then leads to a random detour that results in a (false) link to the Divergent series:
Next is a truly impressive stretch of exhaustive investigative work that included looking up “every movie and Broadway show released from April through the summer [of 2011],” watching “random YouTube videos” from April 2011, and having his conspiracy theorist friend “scouring Bing and Google Street View.”
Not sure who even uses Bing anymore but alright.
All this work ultimately led to a breakthrough on the coronavirus-looking microscope slide thingy:
Turns out the random thingy on the billboard seen next to Chris Evans isn’t an image of the coronavirus, it was just spaghetti. Anticlimactic? Yeah a little, but it’s about the journey not the destination for this sort of thing you know?
Once again we need to stress that these theories are nonsense and have no basis in reality other than pure coincidence, but there’s just no stopping conspiracy theorists who are increasingly convinced that awful world events like a global coronavirus pandemic was foreshadowed years ago in pop culture and Captain America movies.
But while the theories are definitely false, at least they’re stupidly entertaining and we could use a bit of levity thanks to what’s happening around the world right now.
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