Due next spring, Avengers 4 promises to be the biggest movies in Marvel’s history to date, considering how Infinity War ended, and we already have some huge spoilers for you, so make sure you avoid this post if you want to try to keep everything a mystery until next May.
Infinity War killed off several of the significant Avengers heroes we’ve grown to love, including many characters that are supposed to appear in standalone films that will take place after the events in Avengers 4. We already know about that at least one movie starts minutes after Avengers 4 concludes, which means various characters will be resurrected.
But I’m not talking about this kind of spoilers. Yes, many of the dead will come back to life. It’s a trick that has been used in comic books and cinema for years. I’m talking about actual spoilers from those involved in the making of these movies, and who revealed part of the Avengers 4 plot even before we knew what was going to happen in Infinity War. Only, at the time, nobody realized how valuable those comments were. So let’s travel back in time!
Spider-Man and Doctor Strange are two of the dead Avengers that will come back to life in Avengers 4. Tom Holland and Benedict Cumberbatch gave an interview at some point after they had finished shooting all their Avengers 3 and 4 scenes, promoting Infinity War, but before Ant-Man and the Wasp was done. And here’s what Tom Holland had to say about their roles (check out the Emergency Awesome video at the end of this post):
He has the most difficult lines though. He has to talk about so much Quantum Realm stuff. I just have to talk about, ‘Yeah, man, that’s awesome!’ So mine is easy but his is so difficult!
Remember that both characters die in Infinity War. And while Spider-Man’s afraid to die, Doctor Strange knows this is the only way for them to beat Thanos. After all, he did see more than 14 million futures, out of which just one turned out to be in their favor.
Let’s circle back to Ant-Man 2 and those credits scenes that tie the movie to Infinity War. Ant-Man ends up in the quantum realm, while Hope, Hank, and Janet turn to ashes in a parking lot. This gives us an idea of what Ant-Man was doing just as Doctor Strange and Co. were dying on Earth and other planets.
And guess what, Ant-Man is stuck in the quantum realm. And Doctor Strange has a lot of quantum realm lines. What a coincidence! That means time traveling is going to be part of the upcoming movie. There must be a reason why Ant-Man, the Wasp, Hank, and Janet were in that parking lot. That energy they were trying to collect from the quantum realm must be valuable. And Doctor Strange might have something to do with that.
So these leaks from the past spoil Avengers 4 because Holland and Cumberbatch had no idea that what they were saying might be interpreted differently after we’d see Infinity War and Ant-Man 2. In fact, it’s statements like these that helped us figure out Spider-Man 2 starts after Avengers 4 ends, and that, therefore, Spider-Man is alive.
But wait, there’s more stuff from the past that will haunt Marvel execs.
Just because we expect a lot of heroes to be resurrected, it doesn’t mean others won’t die. Marvel explained not too long ago that there’s a reason why the original Avengers team was left alive. They’re supposed to fix things.
In an interview with the Toronto Sun on April 27th, which was the premiere day for Infinity War, Marvel Studios president, and Avengers guru Kevin Feige talked at length about the Avengers universe he helped create and what’s in store for the next few years.
He made it clear that, no matter how long superheroes have been present in these movies, storylines do come to an end, suggesting that some of our favorite heroes will die once Avengers 4 concludes. That’s probably the only way to save the others. The jumping-on-a-grenade kind of effort, wink, wink.
Here’s what he had to say about the then-unseen Avengers movies:
[Storylines] can come to an end. The best stories do come to an end. Return of the Jedi was an ending for a long time and as a 10-year-old in 1983 that carried me through 30 years until there was a sequel. That hasn’t happened before in the superhero genre. A new actor comes in, and a new storyline starts right away. We wanted to do it this way because we think that the best stories have a definitive ending to a storyline. That’s certainly what’s going to happen next year with Avengers 4.
The Universe, the world, many of the characters we’ve introduced will continue onward in unexpected ways, some of which I don’t even know yet. But bringing a definitive conclusion at the 22-film mark, and just over 10 years, seemed like the right thing to do.
This doesn’t sound like the kind of deal-with-it statements we saw before about the deaths in Infinity War.
Here’s what Feige had to say earlier in the interview when asked whether the changes about to happen in Infinity War and Avengers 4 would be finite.
I would say that almost all of them are permanent changes. We pull examples from comics all the time and I would say in the comics sometimes characters come back to life the next day, and sometimes characters that they swore would never come back — Bucky Barnes will never come back to life — come back and it’s awesome like in the Winter Soldier. I don’t know what’s going to happen in five years or 10 years, but in terms of the more immediate future that we’re building and creating now, they will be finite.
It’s very likely that some of the original Avengers may reach their end of life in Avengers 4, while some of the newest will go on for a few more shows. Aside from Spider-Man 2, we know that Doctor Strange 2, Black Panther 2, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 are all in the making.
When asked how different Infinity War and Avengers 4 are and whether Thanos is the main villain, Feige had this to say:
I don’t want to be that specific about it. I will say that tonally, in ways that people will not be able to tell until they see Avengers 4, tonally they are very different movies by design. But they connect very directly; as directly as any of our films have been connected. So Infinity War is a complete story, but people are going to want to know what happens next right away.
Yes, that’s correct. We do want to know, and that’s why digging for all these spoilers is so much fun.
Remember that video I mentioned above? Check it:
