Once it was clear that Captain Marvel was going to decimate the global box office, Marvel Studios released the first full trailer for Avengers: Endgame. Unsurprisingly, it’s chock-full of visual goodies that fans are equally excited about and frantic over, but there’s a catch: We don’t actually know how much of this footage is really going to make it into the final cut of Joe and Anthony Russo’s upcoming blockbuster. And according to the pair’s recent interview with Empire Magazine, chances are pretty good that we’ve already been fooled.
As reported by Coming Soon, Joe Russo told Empire that “the thing that’s most important to us is that we preserve the surprise of the narrative.” Along with his brother Anthony, they also spoke to Marvel “about all scales of marketing” for Endgame because, to be blunt, they didn’t want to spoil anything for moviegoers come late April. “When I was a kid and saw The Empire Strikes Back at 11 a.m. on the day it opened,” Joe added. “It so profoundly moved me because I didn’t know a damn thing about the story I was going to watch. We’re trying to replicate that experience.”
By “replicate,” of course, he means throwing fans who are scouring every single frame of Endgame promotional materials off the scent of the film’s actual plot — even if that means planting fake footage in the trailers and teasers. They’ve done this before. At the very end of the official Avengers: Infinity War trailer, fans were greeted with an epic shot of Captain America, Black Widow, Black Panther, Okoye, Winter Soldier and the Hulk leading a Wakandan army into battle. When Infinity War finally hit theaters, audiences quickly realized that the shot wasn’t in the film.
Not long after Infinity War‘s release, the Russos explained themselves on an episode of Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast. “We use all the material that we have at our disposal to create a trailer,” they said. “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, in other words, don’t be too surprised if some of the cooler-looking shots from Endgame‘s latest trailer don’t end up in the finished film.
(Via Empire Magazine, h/t Coming Soon)