The Call of Duty Celebrity Fest Deserves a Comeback Over Any Movie

The Case for Absurdity Over Prestige

Somewhere between the endless discourse about whether Call of Duty deserves a cinematic universe and the quiet death of genuinely weird franchise marketing, PC Gamer has raised a reasonable question: what if Activision just brought back the chaotic celebrity spectacle that once gave us Will Arnett on a mission to recover his own stolen junk?

The outlet published a piece this week arguing that Activision should shelve its reported Call of Duty movie ambitions and instead resurrect what sounds like one of gaming’s stranger promotional traditions. The campaign in question featured Arnett in a scenario absurd enough that summarizing it almost undersells it. He went looking for his own anatomy. That was the bit. And according to PC Gamer, it worked in the best possible way.

What Made That Campaign Worth Missing

Call of Duty has always had a complicated relationship with its own cultural gravity. The franchise is enormous, militaristically serious in tone, and also somehow the same series that once leaned hard into celebrity weirdness as a marketing strategy. That tension is part of what made the old campaigns so memorable. You had a game about tactical military operations and also, apparently, Will Arnett running around hunting for himself.

The PC Gamer argument is less about nostalgia for a specific ad and more about a philosophy of franchise presentation. Big-budget Hollywood productions require years of development, enormous financial risk, and a constant battle against the general public’s skepticism toward video game adaptations. A well-executed, genuinely funny celebrity campaign, by contrast, can land in a week and be talked about for years. The Arnett material is being written about right now, in 2026, which is the whole point.

There is also something to be said for knowing what your brand actually is. Call of Duty is not a property that lends itself naturally to the kind of emotionally grounded prestige storytelling that has made some game adaptations successful. The Last of Us it is not. Leaning into spectacle, humor, and a willingness to be a little stupid about it might be closer to the franchise’s actual personality than any serious theatrical production could manage.

The Movie Question Lingers

None of this is to say a Call of Duty film is impossible to pull off. The source material covers enough tonal ground, across the Modern Warfare, Black Ops, and Warzone branches of the franchise, that a skilled creative team could find an angle. But as PC Gamer notes, the path from announcement to screens is long and littered with projects that never quite arrived.

Meanwhile, the celebrity marketing era produced something immediate, shareable, and genuinely strange. Those are qualities that tend to age well in gaming culture, where the community has a long memory for things that made them laugh. A three-minute video with a confused Will Arnett has more rewatchability than most theatrical trailers, and costs a fraction of what development on a feature film requires.

The underlying point the piece makes is a practical one. Activision has a franchise with an enormous, active audience that already knows the games and cares about the characters. Reaching that audience through something weird and fun, something that treats the fans as people who can appreciate a joke, might serve the brand better than years of development on a film that may or may not resonate.

It is at least worth remembering that somewhere out there, footage exists of Will Arnett urgently trying to locate his own junk on behalf of a first-person shooter franchise. That is a thing that happened, and apparently it was good enough that people are still arguing it deserves to come back.