Army Edits Jonathan Majors Out of New Ad Campaign
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In the wake of his arrest, Jonathan Majors has been the subject of career pushback. As news broke on Saturday that the Creed III star was arrested in Manhattan, the actor immediately found himself in hot water. The first institution to separate itself from the Lovecraft Country star was the U.S. Army.
The military branch tapped Majors to narrate its new “Be All You Can Be” campaign, but quickly pulled the ads following his arrest. According to Deadline, the Army will now edit him out of the commercials and run them during the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Championship Final Four.
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“A majority of that content did not contain our main narrator. So we have a ton of content to go back to, to create basically new commercials, new ads, if we need to,” Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, head of Army marketing, told The Associated Press. “The campaign is full steam ahead.”
If Majors truly was just the narrator, it makes perfect sense that the Army would proceed without him. It has reportedly spent $117 million on the campaign, which includes social media, TV, digital and physical billboards.
The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania star was charged with two counts of assault in the third degree, attempted assault in the third degree, aggravated harassment in the second degree, and harassment in the second degree. These charges stem from what the NYPD called a “domestic dispute” with a 30-year-old woman. On Sunday, the actor’s lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, stated his innocence.
“Jonathan Majors is completely innocent and is probably the victim of an altercation with a woman he knows,” Chaudhry said in a statement. “We are quickly gathering and presenting evidence to the District Attorney with the expectation that all charges will be dropped imminently.”
Career wise, the biggest questions in this discussion come from Disney and Marvel Studios. Majors plays Kang in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The character is the villain of the next phase, and seemingly set to appear across multiple films and series. In the wake of his arrest, fans were calling for a recast.
Whether he’s guilty or innocent, it’s going to be extremely difficult for Marvel Studios to sell audiences on a storyline centered around an alleged abuser. That’s just the hard truth. At the end of the day, this is show business and the company is trying to sell this universe to families and children. There’s even a precedent within the franchise, as Don Cheadle replaced Terrence Howard in the role of James “Rhodey” Rhodes/War Machine and it wasn’t a huge blow to the character.
So far, Majors has only appeared in Loki Season 1 and Quantumania, though it looks like he may have also shot scenes for Loki Season 2. If Marvel is going to recast, the studio needs to do it now before we get too deep into Kang’s story.
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