Hey, remember that scene in Avengers: Infinity War where Hulk is in Wakanda, charging into battle alongside Captain America, Black Panther and various other heroes? What’s that? You don’t? Well, that’s probably because there was no scene like this in the movie, but it sure was in the trailers. And in the promotion for the upcoming Avengers: Endgame, it seems that directors Anthony and Joe Russo have once more been giving us fake footage to throw off the theorists.
In a recent interview with Empire, Joe Russo justified their choice to use misleading clips as a means of maintaining the element of surprise:
“We talked about all scales of marketing. The thing that’s most important to us is that we preserve the surprise of the narrative. When I was a kid and saw The Empire Strikes Back at 11am on the day it opened…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.”
It’s true that in the days of Empire Strikes Back, fans didn’t have every minute of promotional footage available on YouTube to scrutinize on a frame-by-frame level. Joe Russo expanded further on their approach in an interview last summer with the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast, explaining that they regard the trailer as a separate entity from the film itself:
“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.”
It’s strange to think that trailers are among the few forms of advertising where it’s okay to outright lie about the product you’re selling, but most fans don’t seem to mind that they’re going into the Infinity War sequel knowing little about the story to come.
At the same time, knowing that we can’t always believed what the footage tells us has got some fans trying to second-guess the Russo Brothers. For example, when the Super Bowl TV spot dropped last month, there was much speculation that some key characters may have been edited out of a couple of shots to avoid spoilers. All in all, trailer analysis is a tricky game to win when you’re dealing with Marvel, but we’ll find out what footage is or isn’t legit once Avengers: Endgame hits theaters on April 26th.