Did film ‘Captain America’ predict COVID-19 in 2011?

A conspiracy theory, which went viral on social media, claimed that film ‘Captain America’ had predicted the novel coronavirus in 2011. 

The bizarre theory was shared on Instagram by a user named lexfuture, liking the superhero film to the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said, “Fom the 2011 film Captain America: The First Avenger. Behind his right shoulder, a corona beer and on his left, the image of a ‘coronavirus’ in New York City.”

A friend who’s fully into the covid conspiracies sent me this post that says Captain America predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 2011, and while its obviously bs, I started fixating on that circled image on the right. pic.twitter.com/N4XywDTZEx

— William Mullally 🚮 (@whmullally) June 11, 2020

The film critic, William Mullally, shared his findings on Twitter in a thread that has since gone viral. Mullally said that he could not stop fixating on the ‘virus’ image as it looked very familiar، Mirror reported.

“At first I thought it reminded me of a YA novel cover design from that era. I went through all the main ones until I remembered the Divergent cover had the same color scheme, but not quite the same design. Close, but no cigar,” he wrote.

“I enlisted my friend Wes (Wesley Thrower) for help, who found a clearer screenshot and zoomed in and it felt even more familiar but we couldn’t quite place it.”

Mullally then looked up the filming date for that particular scene in the movie and researched which Broadway shows were playing at the time, thinking it could have been part of an ad for a musical.

He found nothing, but he wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

“I started watching random YouTube videos and looking for images from April 2011 in Times Square. No clear view of the poster. Wes started scouring Bing and Google street view,” Mullally added.

“Finally, Wes found this. We recognized the logo and the color scheme. We cracked the case.”

He pointed out that the alleged microbe poster was actually an advertisement for the Italian food company Barilla. The image shows spaghetti arranged to resemble a firework, accompanied by the message “Buone Feste,” or “Happy Holidays” in Italian.

Corona beer has no affiliation with the new coronavirus. According to a May 2020 article in The Economist (  here  ), the

Mexican brewer Grupo Modelo began producing Corona beer in Mexico City in the 1920s. “Corona” is the Spanish word for “crown,” hence the crown insignia featured on the bottle-cap and label since 1963.