Avengers: Endgame comes out in nine days (eight days if you were lucky enough to get a special preview ticket), and it’s remarkable how little we know about the movie. The plot summary for the three-hour-long epic is comically vague (“The grave course of events set in motion by Thanos that wiped out half the universe and fractured the Avengers ranks compels the remaining Avengers to take one final stand” — most of that is about Infinity War!) and the footage that we have seen is intentionally misleading. There’s been “fake” footage (or scenes that won’t make the final cut) and characters have been edited out.
Take a look at the blank space between Bruce Banner and James Rhodes, standing outside the Avengers facility, in the Endgame Super Bowl teaser.
There’s clearly someone there (Invisible Woman?), but it wasn’t until the new “Awesome” television spot that we knew, with all due respect to Taylor Swift, whose name to write between the Hulk and War Machine. Drum roll, please.
Oh. It’s Pepper. Yay? It was already a strong bet that Steve Rodgers, Natasha Romanoff, and the other depressed superheroes were looking skyward at Tony Stark’s return to Earth, but now that Pepper is there, too, consider it a lock (especially because we know he makes it back safe and sound). It’s a scene that happens in “the first 15, maybe 20 minutes of the film,” unless Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige is also lying, er, stretching the truth. Who knows!
Here’s the new spot.
Avengers: Endgame opens on April 26.