Why We Can't Trust Avengers: Endgame Trailer Footage
In the past few months we’ve received two full Avengers: Endgame trailers. Both did a fantastic job of building hype for the movie without revealing too much of anything, and that’s really all their meant to do, meaning we can’t really look at the trailers as credible sources for what’s going to happen in the movie. MCU trailers tend to have altered scenes and even trailer specific scenes so that audiences are thrown off the trail as to what is actually going to happen in the movie. For instance, the trailers for Infinity War have some key difference from what we actually see in the movie (look no further than the “assemble” scene featuring the Hulk in the Battle of Wakanda).
Possible Fake Endgame Scenes
Joe Russo has already come out and said that the story the trailers reflect are different from the story of the actual movie. While filming, the crew accumulated a lot of footage that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film. Some of this footage was instead used to form the trailers for the movie. The scenes were edited and manipulated for this purpose. In fact, one of the key scenes we’ve seen in the recent Avengers: Endgame Special Look has been labeled a possible fake by the Russo brothers. You’ll have to take that with a grain of salt though since even the Russo’s have been known to fib every now and again when it comes to these movies.
During an interview with Fox, Joe Russo flat out stated that one of the scenes in the Avengers Endgame: Special Look trailer isn’t real, that it doesn’t appear in the film. He says this despite the fact that it’s a pretty important looking scene too. You’ll remember it; it’s the one staring Tony and Steve. The one where Tony asks Steve if he trusts him. This scene is the first look we’ve gotten at the MCU tackling the tension between Tony and Steve since their fallout in Captain America: Civil War. Joe did make a comment after the fact toward the end of the discussion that stated that maybe the scene is, in fact, in the film, but that just goes to show you can’t trust anything being said or shown about the movie.
This a pretty effective trick when you’re trying to keep potential spoilers about one of cinema's biggest events under wraps and still promote it at the same time. So many of us get these trailers and then try to breakdown what we’re presented in order to craft theories on potential plot elements that take place in the movie. If there wasn’t anything in the trailers that could mislead us, the possibility of multiple people coming up with correct theories about the film would be way too high. That would leave the movie with very little to surprise us with when we eventually went in to see it.
Going back to what the Russo’s said about the Tony-Steve scene. Even if the scene does happen to appear in the movie, everything else about the trailer is still pretty sketchy. It doesn’t help that back in March, Joe Russo said that he and Anthony even convinced the marketing teams to mislead audiences with the trailers. So yeah, it’s pretty hard to trust anything we’re actually seeing (if, of course, we’re taking the Russo’s at their word).
The trailers themselves actually offer some evidence that their not honest. The Big Game TV Spot teaser and the “Honor” TV Spot, for instance, share a scene, yet this scene differs between the two of them.
At the end of both trailers, we see the Avengers have assembled and are making their way through the hanger of their base to go do some aveneging. At the end of the Big Game Teaser, we see the assembled members are made up of Captain America, Black Widow, War Machine, Rocket Raccoon, Hawkeye, and Ant-Man. However, in the “Honor” teaser, we get Captain America, Black Widow, Ant-Man, Nebula, Tony Stark, Rocket Raccoon, War Machine, and Hawkeye. The Big Game Teaser had some of the heroes edited out. You could argue that the silhouettes make it difficult to tell who’s in the Big Game Teaser to begin with, but you can’t argue that only one of the silhouettes looks like it belongs to a female (Black Widow). Nebula is definitely nowhere to be seen in that teaser shot.
Digitally Edited In?
Speaking about Nebula and Tony, there’s some worry revolving around them as well. A lot of fans don’t actually believe that the two heroes are there walking among the rest of the Avengers. It’s a general consensus that the two of them were simply digitally inserted into the shot to give the feel of the Avengers’ team assembling.
We mentioned the first Infinity War trailer a little earlier, and its “Avengers Assemble” scene. The trailer shows all of the Avengers that were on Earth during the Battle of Wakanda charging into the fight together. This scene, epic as it was, did not show up in the movie at all. We got a much different shot of the Avengers charging at their enemies. For one thing, the Hulk doesn’t make an appearance at all during the Battle of Wakanda (well, he does have a minor cameo). He peaces out of the film at the very beginning after taking a very convincing “L” from Thanos. War Machine and Falcon don’t hover near the team either. The two of them are actually providing air support and already attacking the enemy by the time everyone on the ground runs in to join the fray. Basically, in the trailer, this scene served to tell the story of the Avengers assembling to defend Wakanda from Thanos’ forces, but in the movie the scene serves to show the start of the fight to protect the Vision from Thanos.
To ironically use the first Endgame trailer as an example, Tony and Nebula were supposed to be stranded in space, emphases on the word “stranded.” The ship that the two of them were on (the Guardians’ Benatar) could no longer provide them with food and water, and Tony made it perfectly clear that he would run out of oxygen sooner rather than later. Basically, the two of them were in a pretty dire situation and had no idea how exactly they were going to get out of it. By all accounts, Tony sounded like he had just given up, which is why he was trying to get a message down to Pepper before he suffocated to death. The trailer went out of its way to drive this point home. Literally half of the trailer is dedicated to showing off Tony and Nebula’s situation. So it seems pretty odd, that after putting so much emphasis on it, we now suddenly have Nebula and Tony back on Earth safe and sound. They make it back to Earth as though they were never in any danger in the first place. Thus the belief most fans have that Tony and Nebula aren’t actually on Earth; they’re still in space, stranded and trying to figure out a way to get the ship working before Tony’s lack of oxygen kills him.
Digitally Edited Out?
It’s also a bit suspicious that Thor, Bruce, and Captain Marvel are missing from this scene. If the Avengers are assembling to take on Thanos, you would think they’d have their heaviest hitters with them, right? They are in their Quantum Realm suits so they may be off to do something different, but that doesn’t explain why Thor, Bruce and Captain Marvel aren’t there. Other trailer scenes show that the three of them were at the headquarters during a time the others were there: Thor tests Captain Marvel’s grit and likes the results, and Bruce is talking with Rhodey and the others about their options concerning Thanos. There are potential reasons for this of course, but since the trailer footage has a high chance of lying, could it be that they were digitally edited out?
We know from the Captain Marvel mid-credits scene that she officially made it the Avengers’ HQ, and from it looks like, she made it pretty quickly too. Steve and others seemed to be watching a death toll to confirm whether or not Thanos went through with his promise of whipping out half of existence right before Captain Marvel arrived. That would mean she’s been on Earth for some time, certainly long enough to be walking with the Avengers in this shot — wherever their going. Is she looking for Fury? It’s a possibility considering the Avengers don’t definitively know whether or not he was dusted (although they would have a pretty good idea). If she thinks there may be a possibility that Nick’s alive, she may try her own hand at finding him, but it’s hard to imagine the Avengers being unable to convince her otherwise.
Bruce definitely seems like a candidate to have been digitally edited out of this shot, most people seem to think so. The Hulk has been rather stubborn lately when it comes to helping out. He just flatly refuses to. The Russo’s state that this was because he was tired of Banner treating him like an attack dog, always giving him the “driver's seat” to solve everyone else’s problems but then trying to force him into the “trunk” when he has no more use for him. This back and forth battle for dominance between Bruce and Hulk has been the primary source of conflict for their story, and the Russo’s have stated that the Hulk’s arc is coming to a close with Endgame. We’ve seen promotional art of the Hulk for Endgame and he definitely looks different from his other appearances throughout the MCU. He looks like Professor Hulk, who is basically the fusion of the Hulk and Bruce. If the Russo’s wanted to keep this reveal out of the trailer, then the digital removal of the Hulk makes the most sense. They’ve already done the opposite with him in the Infinity War trailers, so why not do it here too?
Thor is bit more understandable as to why he’s not in the scene. He been shown to be out and about in numerous trailers, off doing his own thing. What exactly he’s doing, we have no clue. But if the Avengers are making moves to take Thanos down in this shot, (it wouldn’t really make since for them to assemble for any other reason), would they really move without having Thor there? They don’t answer to him or anything, but considering one of the many reasons they lost to Thanos in the first place was because they were split up throughout Infinity War, you’d think they’d wanna have all hands on deck, especially since they’re a little short on man power, having lost half of their friends and whatnot.
Wrap Up
All in all, the Avengers trailers and clips are great for hyping things up, but not giving anything away. The Russo’s have thoroughly gone and made the information presented as muddled as they can. Are all the scenes in the trailers fake? Probably not, but a good majority of the ones that seem to go over important details are probably either fake or heavily edited to throw people of the trail of what’s actually going on. It won’t stop anyone from theorizing mind you -- there’s just way too much fun in it -- but it will serve to keep spoilers as far away from the public as possible.
Hell, the Russo’s aren’t even sure they gave any of the cast members a real script while shooting the movie, so any interviews involving any of the actors leaking information may not be accurate either, aside from Tom and Mark’s Infinity War spoilers, which is probably one of the main reasons for all this secrecy. We know for certain that Tom doesn’t even get a full script. Hilariously enough, he just gets a block of redacted pages.
