Marvel pulled out all the stops this week when it comes to Avengers: Endgame marketing, releasing plenty of new footage, including a Special Look trailer, a new TV spot, as well as a rerun of an entire Avengers 4 scene that only a lucky few got to see it in the previous weeks. We already analyzed each clip, at least the ones that are widely available, and told you everything you needed to know about the new footage, reminding you in the process that not everything is what it seems to be. Marvel told us time and again that MCU trailers are meant to be misleading. They use shots that might never make it into the final cut of the movie, as well as CGI to hide spoilers. That said, they can’t hide everything, and there’s a pretty big Endgame spoiler hiding in plain sight in the latest trailer. And we nearly missed it. If you want to avoid Endgame spoilers you’d better walk away right now.
No matter how close you look, trying to analyze everything that happens in these fast-paced trailers, you might still miss a thing or two — and the only way to watch them is on YouTube, where you can freeze each shot and peek inside. So far, we discovered several potential spoilers in previous trailers, that can’t be the Russos trying to mislead us.
For example, we didn’t see Ant-Man rolling along what looks like Hank Pym’s laboratory, because we watched the wrong version of the trailer. Also, we missed the fact that Hawkeye was wearing an ankle monitor in a scene, because we were too busy analyzing the other characters in the shot. Hawkeye is the star of two additional spoilers from the trailers, including the fact that he and Natasha are aboard the Benatar on Earth. Finally, the 3D version of the trailer showed us who’s chasing Hawkeye in that scene with lots of explosions.
This brings us to this week’s First Look trailer, and this particular shot of Thanos:
Thanos does the voiceover in this climactic point of the trailer, which is what we’re all focused on. I did tell you earlier this week that the Mad Titan is teleporting himself to a planet, either Xandar or Earth, with what I believed to be a weapon in his right hand.
But just as I wrote those words, I hadn’t realized I ignored this huge spoiler. You see, there are only two types of Mad Titans in this world. The kind of Thanos that beams himself and his minions up and down with the help of his ship technology, in his pre-Tesseract-acquisition days. And — you probably realize where I’m going with this — the Thanos who’s able to wield the power of the Space stone to go wherever he desires.
Now, in the Special Look trailer, the CGI effects show Thanos being beamed down to the planet from a ship. It’s absolutely clear that he’s not using the Space Stone to do it. And that itself is a huge spoiler.
This tells us that the battle we’re about to witness takes place in the past, maybe on Xandar, at a time when Thanos did not have any of the Infinity Stones installed on his special Gauntlet. Or, maybe, it’s all happening in the present, after the snap, but the Gauntlet is no longer able to offer him the luxury of teleporting himself across galaxies. In either case, this is still a massive revelation about Endgame because it practically confirms there’s time travel in the movie. Either the Avengers have gone back in the past him to fight him before he gets any of the Stones, or they’re about to go back to the drawing board — which will result in time travel — as they realize the Gauntlet is no longer functional, so stealing it to undo the snap is pointless.
We already know for a fact that some of the surviving Avengers will chase Thanos through the universe, as Marvel twice showed a scene that shows the preparations for fighting Thanos early in the first Act. But, considering they’re going after him so soon, we can only expect them to lose again against the Titan. That’s the kind of outcome that might convince them to find a different way to prevent the Decimation, which could involve plenty of traveling back in time.
I will again remind you that trailers can be misleading, and there’s always a possibility that the Russos planted the Thanos teleportation scene so that fans would interpret it exactly as I did above.
