Disney/Marvel are just the greatest there could be at putting out a particular trailer and amp-ing up a movie. They’ve been marketing their movies this year rather differently, as we’ve seen with the trailers of Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame. They are not planning to give a whole lot away.
Since Captain Marvel is in the final stage of its marketing, there will obviously be a slew of trailers and teasers out there with little bits of new footage getting added one after the other, but this hasn’t been the case with Avengers: Endgame, and it probably won’t be till the very end.
Captain Marvel started marketing by giving away as least plot points as they could. The first three trailers ranged between 1.5-.2.5 minutes with the repetition of footage in all three trailers. The new Super Bowl TV Spot came out with some fresh footage, but that’s about it.
Captain Marvel still has a lot stored for us to watch in the theatres, and we can be pretty sure of the fact that Marvel would have misled us in many ways to prevent spoilers. The level of misleading in this fashion is toned down in trailers for solo movies, but when it comes to big team-ups like Civil War, Infinity War or even Thor: Ragnarok, we just can’t trust these trailer for what they represent.
We have seen time and time again with these trailers that they show some things which are totally different from what we get in the films. If you consider the example of the Age of Ultron trailer, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch and Vision were missing when the Avengers assembled for the money shot.
In Civil War, Spidey was not a part of the airport battle when Team Iron Man assembled. Thor: Ragnarok showed us Hulk as a part of team Thor when all of them assembled on the Bifrost bridge, but in the film, Hulk was fighting off Fenris when the “Revengers” assembled.
The biggest example of misleading was the money shot of Infinity War, where the Avengers were running in with the Hulk in Wakanda. But that never happened. To follow that in the second trailer, we were presented with a scene that teased to kill off Captain America, and people lost their minds. But in the film, Captain America standing up to Thanos turned out to be a very short moment.
So these big movie trailers just can’t be trusted. The trailers cannot be taken at their face value and the Russos are certified masters at editing trailers. This is why people have been asking the question of what all was a misdirect in the two sets of footage that we have got for Avengers: Endgame. There could be a lot. Shuri went missing could be a big misdirection from the first trailer, and now the TV Spot surely edited and removed a few people here and there.
So why do that? Sometimes doing this makes us feel robbed. But the answer is simple. The Russos just want to prevent for anything to get leaked so we have the best experience. Trailers earlier did not do this, but now they’ve started to lie right on our faces. And instead of being angry about it, we should appreciate it as our movie experience doesn’t get ruined.
The Russos were asked about this last year and here’s what Joe Russo told everyone at the Happy Sad Confused podcast in May:
“We use all the material that we have at our disposal to create a trailer. We look at the trailer as a very different experience than the movie, and I think audiences are so predictive now that you have to be very smart about how you craft a trailer because an audience can watch a trailer and basically tell you what’s gonna happen in the film. We consume too much content. So at our disposal are lots of different shots that aren’t in the movie that we can manipulate through CG to tell a story that we want to tell specifically for the purpose of the trailer and not for the film.”
So, thank you Joe & Anthony Russo, but the trick you played for the Avengers: Endgame title was cruel!
