‘Avengers: Endgame’ Directors Imply They’re Tricking Us With The Trailers

You probably could have guessed this, given the insane difficulty of managing fan expectations ahead of a movie release as big as Avengers: Endgame, but the directors have confirmed it: they’re fucking with you with these trailers. In a nice way.

Speaking to Empire, brothers Joe and Anthony Russo confirmed that their focus right now is maintaining the “surprise of the narrative” over marketing the movie.

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 open […] 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 clear that the Russos are counting on the fact that obsessive fans analyse every single frame of the trailers and extra material released before the film comes out, and are ensuring that the actual rhythms of the plot aren’t exposed.

This isn’t unprecedented from them – you might recall that the epic final shot of the Avengers: Infinity War trailer, in which Captain America led a squad of superheroes in a charge towards the camera, never actually appeared in the final film. The final conflict in Wakanada ended up playing out differently to how the trailer implied it would.

“We use all the material that we have at our disposal to create a trailer,” the Russos said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast at the time.

“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 there you go. Don’t necessarily trust the 120-minute trailer breakdowns uploaded to YouTube for your hints on where the Endgame plot is going.

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