Last Thursday, when the final receipts were still coming in for Captain Marvel’s fantastic first week in release, Marvel unexpectedly dropped a new trailer for this year’s biggest movie: Avengers: Endgame.
The trailer had the Avengers rocking fancy suits and new hairdos, lots of great character moments and plenty to obsess and speculate over. It was an intense and emotionally fraught two-and-a-half minutes that poetically honored the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s past and its decade-long journey, while getting you amped to go into a battle where the cost of victory will be high. The Avengers: Endgame trailer was everything you could possibly want it to be and more. It’s also the last thing I want to see from this movie before its release.
Like the Jedi, it’s time for the Avengers: Endgame trailers (and TV spots, and new footage) to end.
Now, upfront it should be said that the newest trailer is seemingly the ‘Final Trailer’ so we may be safe on that account. But there are no guarantees. There is still over a month left to go and the marketing campaign hasn’t really ramped up yet. I am not so naïve as to think that there won’t be any TV spots prior to this film’s release, heck there haven’t really been any-- yet sans the Super Bowl trailer.
What I am arguing for here is that there should be no new footage for Avengers: Endgame put out, beyond what has already been released. The reasons for that are simple: we don’t need to see anymore, and each new bit of footage at this point would reveal more of the story and open up the possibility of spoilers.
This is not to say that the trailers thus far have shown us too much, on the contrary they have shown us just enough in what has been a pitch perfect marketing campaign. To date, there have been two full trailers and a Big Game spot for Avengers: Endgame. They have all been focused on establishing the tone and the stakes for the characters, than they have been about laying out the plot of the movie.
We’ve been shown the fallout of The Decimation and the bleakness the characters face after Avengers: Infinity War. It's also been shown that the Avengers can’t just accept their losses and move on, and will do whatever it takes to try and change what happened. What we haven’t been shown is the exact contours of their plan and the plot itself. Sure, fans that read sites like this one can probably make an educated guess at the ‘how’ of it all, but the trailers haven’t explicitly laid that out, giving us only hints.
To this point I don’t even think we’ve seen much of Endgame’s third act, beyond a few shots like Cap’s grimace, Ant-Man’s eraser launch and Nebula’s battle cry in the most recent trailer. However, some have said that seeing Nebula and Tony Stark with the rest of the team in the white suits is a spoiler that those two make it back from Titan. But let’s be real, just like nobody thought Jon Snow was going to stay dead, literally no one thought that Nebula and especially Iron Man were going to die from lack of oxygen on a ship.
Consider that the trailers haven’t even really shown Thanos beyond a Gladiator-esque shot of him walking through a field. We haven’t seen the Hulk either, so as far as we know he and Bruce Banner are still working out their performance issues. Even the cute Captain Marvel and Thor moment isn’t really a spoiler if you watched the end-credits scene of Captain Marvel.
You’ll often hear movie fans complain about trailers that spoil too much, and justifiably so. Yet, despite the fact that the Avengers: Endgame trailers have committed any spoilery sins, I still don’t want to see any more; no more trailers and no new footage in any form, be it TV spots or otherwise. Every new bit of footage runs the risk of further fleshing out the plot and spoiling us on something.
The trailers for Endgame have done their job and they’ve done it marvelously. They have been awesome, emotional and chill inducing. With Hawkeye-like precision, the trailers have hit the sweet spot of being enough to sell me, but not enough to spoil me. I’m already sold and I couldn’t possibly get more hyped for this movie than I already am.
Marvel doesn’t need to show us another frame of footage to sell Avengers: Endgame. The film is already tracking to have the biggest opening weekend ever and there’s not a single person who is on the fence about seeing this movie that can be pushed over the edge by another trailer. You’re either out, or, like most of the world, you’re in on this movie and would have been even if there had never been a single trailer. Just recut the already released footage for a variety of TV spots and you’re good to go.
Asking for the footage from this year’s most anticipated movie to stop is admittedly a strange request. Especially given that in the long drought after Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp, we were begging to see the trailer for Avengers 4. And a year before that, fans were demanding to see the Avengers: Infinity War trailer. Right now Star Wars fans are going through their own test of patience, waiting to find out the title and see the first footage from Episode IX.
Nevertheless, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and any more Endgame footage risks doing more harm than good. I’ve always believed that movie trailers are part of the experience, and I’m glad we’ve seen what we’ve seen so far to get us as hyped as possible for this unprecedented cinematic event. If there’s new footage I’ll have to watch it, but Marvel has achieved the perfect balance with the Avengers: Endgame trailers, it would be a shame for that balance to be upset by showing us too much.
Avengers: Endgame opens in theaters on April 26. Check out our 2019 Release Schedule to see all the movies that are not Endgame headed to theaters this year.
