I never give Little Caesars enough credit. I don't order their pizza very often, but when I do, I find myself thinking, "this is an okay delivery pizza." And that's, I mean, pretty good, all things considered. Beyond this, though, I like that Little Caesars is willing to go all in on a marketing promotion. A few years ago, they made a Bat Pizza, which was their pizza shaped like a bat, and it tied in with one of the many Batman movies. I tried it! It was fine. Good enough!
When I found out about their Fantastic Four: First Steps marketing tie-in, I knew it was time to place another order. The company had four pizza boxes, each with a different FF character on it; if you placed them all together, the "4" logo connected the boxes in the middle. My overall goal was to get an empty box. A Thing box. An empty Thing box, without cheese or whatever on it, that I could keep and store and look at and wonder, over the next 30 years, "do I really need to keep this?" It goes in the Thing museum, everyone.
My order was a moderate success. I say this because I did, indeed, get pizza, and I ate it, and it was pretty good. I got the Invisible Woman box. At the store nearest to my house, the front, ordering area is as close to autonomous as it can get at this point. It's like walking into some strange, liminal space, because no one is there. There's a counter with a menu, but you're directed to a warming station where you're instructed to enter a code to open the door to the space that contains your pizza. It's like ordering a hammer from Lowe's for pickup, but instead of a hammer that you use to pound nails, you eat the hammer, or whatever.
Anyway, when you attempt to get the attention of the pizza makers in the back, they give you a wearied look, but I took my chances because I was hoping to grab a Thing box. I was informed that the workers go through all of one character before moving onto the next, and the Thing boxes were probably in some unopened stack somewhere else. That was fine, of course, and I had no desire to get into a battle of wills with a food service worker (they don't deserve having to deal with some weird, desperate person getting upset over a box), so Sue Storm and I left with one pizza. Here's a picture of it!
The box was, as far as pizza boxes go, pretty neat. It continued to advertise for the movie on the sides:
About a week later, your friend (and mine) Larry barged into a different Little Caesars location and demanded a Thing box. He left with two, and now I have two unused Thing pizza boxes, and my life is 12% better.
I later learned that there was a specific Fantastic Four style pizza being offered, which consisted of one pizza with four toppings on separate sections: cheese, pepperoni, sausage and bacon, and pepperoni and jalapeño peppers. I imagined trying each of these, and that was good enough for me.
There's also a promotional hat floating around there. It's on my radar, and I need to pick it up, but so far it's been elusive. One day, pizza hat.
This was a decent promotional tie-in that didn't require Little Caesars to try out any new pizza recipes. I would have been more excited if they had, say, offered up a Thing pizza. Maybe it could have had a smashed up brick or something on top. Next time.
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