We all remember the Jeremy Renner app, right? The smartphone application from 2017 that Marvel actor Jeremy Renner made as a place to consolidate all his social media posts and interact with his biggest fans? It’s a difficult thing to forget because, well, it’s extremely funny.
Jeremy Renner is a famous actor, so it makes sense that he’d want a community for all his super fans to congregate, but…he’s Hawkeye. He’s in the Avengers, sure, but he’s just some guy with a bow and arrow.
As misguided as the Jeremy Renner app seemed when it launched (and shut down in 2019, I know, I can’t believe it stayed up for that long either), maybe it was actually ahead of its time. Nintendo seems to think so since it decided to do the exact same thing.
Welcome back to the land of the living, Jeremy Renner Official, your new name is Nintendo Today.
Jeremy Renner Yesterday, Nintendo Today
Nintendo Today was announced at this week’s Nintendo Direct. It’s an app for Nintendo fans that does basically everything the Jeremy Renner app did. It’s packed full of news and game updates and serves as a pretty solid way for fans to stay in the know about what Nintendo has going on.
On its first day, Nintendo Today announced the release date for the upcoming live-action Legend of Zelda film, a movie that we haven’t heard much about since its announcement years ago. It’s the sort of thing we can likely expect to see from this app from now on.
While everything found on Nintendo Today can be found elsewhere, it does provide diehard Nintendo fans a place to go if all they care about is news by Nintendo about Nintendo. It’s kind of a press release app if you really want to boil things down. But with pretty pictures and less boring jargon.
Why Make an App Like Nintendo Today?
When Nintendo Today was announced during the Direct, one of the big questions that seemed to be making the internet rounds was, “Uhh, Nintendo, why are you doing this?” Jokes aside, Nintendo Today is basically just the Jeremy Renner app but for Zelda and Mario and Metroid.
As strange as the conceit is, Nintendo is looking for a way to best communicate with its gigantic audience in a way that doesn’t revolve around existing social media platforms. Up until recently, Twitter was one of the primary tools that companies like Nintendo have used to keep their audiences informed. However, Twitter has become a much less viable option in recent years.
Nintendo had a pretty active presence on Twitter, something of a surprise for how old-school the company is when it comes to literally everything else. Unfortunately, Twitter has been overrun by bots in the years since Elon Musk bought the company, making the platform rife with scammers and vitriol. Additionally, Twitter has seen a rise in hate speech, and many people have completely abandoned the site following Musk’s controversial actions in the White House and his Nazi-related gestures.
For a company as family-friendly as Nintendo, Twitter just doesn’t seem like the place for it to thrive anymore. The tricky part, however, is that there hasn’t been a new social media platform that’s taken Twitter’s place in terms of relevance and size, so the company needed to find a way to reach its community of fans who’s fractured off into disparate communities. Nintendo is hardly going to get big on Bluesky all of a sudden…
I can’t confirm for certain that Nintendo Today was made because of Twitter’s new vibe, but it doesn’t seem completely out of the question that it played at least some part in its creation.
Jeremy Renner didn’t know it at the time, but his all-in-one fan app was actually a great idea for companies trying to consolidate all of their fans into a single place. As a way of saying thanks for paving the way, I think Nintendo should cast Jeremy Renner as Ganon in the Zelda movie. Or maybe Beedle? Or the voice of Navi?
