“Imagine if, for the first time, our heroes all lost.”
That’s how Robert Downey Jr. sets up the opening of Marvel’s just-released first featurette for Avengers: Endgame — which, while it doesn’t showcase any new footage, does splice together previously seen clips along with interviews from cast members that helps illuminate the stakes for what’s to come. “We lost,” Chris Evans laments about the dire outcome confronting the heroes thanks to the turn of events in Avengers: Infinity War.
Evans continues, though, by noting how the good thing is “it’s always easier to build people back up after they’re broken down, and that’s something Marvel is great at doing. It’s that shred of hope that everyone’s looking for.” It’s certainly hard to see at this point where that hope will come from in the wake of the epic finger-snap that decimated half the world, but at least we know we’ll be in for a long, entertaining ride exactly one month from today.
When Endgame hits theaters on April 26, we now know it will clock in at just a hair over 180 minutes — 3 hours, 2 minutes, to be exact, according to the now widely reported runtime.
In the new featurette, meanwhile, Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige explains that the fans’ collective reaction to the events of Infinity War — and, specifically, to seeing their favorite characters evaporate into dust — underscores just how emotionally invested Avengers fans have grown to be in these characters. Leading up to the final weeks before the Endgame release, Marvel has also released new character posters showing which of our heroes lived and died.
Those posters come with the tagline, “Avenge the Fallen.”
“We’re in the endgame now,” Tony Stark laments in the new featurette, which you can see at the top of this post. And then he adds: “I know we said no more surprises, but I was really hoping to pull off one last one.”
