A report back in December revealed that Marvel wasn’t too happy with Sony releasing Spider-Man: Far From Home so close to Avengers: Endgame, considering what had just happened in Infinity War. For all we know Spider-Man was killed by the snap, so how could Peter Parker be alive again? Many people wondered whether Far From Home might take place before Avengers: Infinity War in the MCU timeline, but we’ve known the answer to that question for years because Sony said while promoting Homecoming that the action in Spider-Man 2 picks up minutes after Avengers: Endgame concludes.
A few weeks after that story, Sony released two slightly different trailers, which somewhat ruin Endgame because of the way they’re constructed. That was in mid-January, but marketing for the new Spider-Man movie has been brilliant ever since. Before you go any further though, we need to warn you that some Captain Marvel spoilers follow below.
“What marketing?” you’ll ask, and it’s true that Sony hasn’t released any additional trailers or TV spots for Far From Home since January. That’s exactly right, and I’ve just realized how brilliant that is.
Aside from dropping a TV spot for Avengers 4 during the Super Bowl earlier this year, Marvel only focused on promoting its first MCU movie in the early months of 2019. We saw plenty of Captain Marvel TV spots, scenes, and featurettes before the release of the movie earlier this month. Marvel then dropped the second Endgame only after Captain Marvel’s launch weekend, and it was pretty clear why it chose to do things that way.
Captain Marvel doesn’t just introduce Carol Danvers to MCU fans, it also establishes the film’s connections with Infinity War, and most importantly, with Endgame. We’ve always known Carol would be in Endgame, and now we know how she’ll meet the Avengers for the first time thanks to the first Captain Marvel credits scene.
Marvel couldn’t have released the second Endgame trailer, which introduces Captain Marvel, before the Captain Marvel movie came out. We first needed to see Carol and Fury talk about the pager, then see the upgraded version that she created for him, and learn it was to be used only for emergencies. We also needed to see the credits scene where Carol appears seemingly out of nowhere inside the Avengers HQ, right after Fury’s pager stops working and right after Black Widow insists they have to find out who Fury beeped.
On the other hand, because of what happened in Infinity War, Endgame is one of the few films in moviemaking history that doesn’t need trailers. It’s the most talked about movie in the world right now, and I don’t think there’s any other film like it. Speaking to Empire Magazine (via ComicBook), the Russos explained that they even considered not doing any marketing for the film.
We did. We talked about all scales of marketing. The thing that’s most important to us is that we preserve the surprise of the narrative. When I was a kid and saw The Empire Strikes Back at 11 am on the day it opened, and sat there until 10 pm watching it back to back to back, it so profoundly moved me because I didn’t know a damn thing about the story I was going to watch. We’re trying to replicate that experience.
Earlier this year, Kevin Feige went on record to say that most of the footage shown in the trailers will be from the first minutes, which is excellent news. Sure, we’ve learned a lot of details from these trailers, but nothing too major.
This brings us to Sony’s new Spider-Man flick. Since January, Sony hasn’t released any additional Far From Home footage, which I think is absolutely a brilliant move. It also helps that Tom Holland didn’t drop any spoilers. We’ve already heard that Sony tried hard to avoid any Endgame spoilers with its first trailer, and it sort of succeeded. But that doesn’t change the fact that three dead fan-favorite characters, including Peter, Nick Fury, and Maria Hill, all show up in the trailer. And look at how calm everyone is in the trailer mere moments after the harrowing events of Endgame came to a close.
Seeing these characters die in Infinity War was heartbreaking. We got plenty of evidence over the summer that they’re all coming back to life, but it’s one thing to speculate and quite another to see them appear in official footage out of nowhere. The revelation that they’re alive after the snap is enough to tell us that somehow, the snap will be undone, or that Thanos didn’t really kill anybody in the first place. We’ve seen plenty of fan theories that try to interpret the Far From Home trailer, but only Endgame will truly explain what happened. Having Sony ruin that moment with a trailer wasn’t ideal.
I’ll also point out that Marvel is already guilty of misleading fans with its trailers and the same might be valid for the first Far From Home trailer. But again, the trailer does show us three people who shouldn’t be alive.
With all that in mind, Sony could always release a second Far From Home trailer before Avengers 4 launches, but hopefully that won’t happen. There’s only so much you can do not to spoil anything else in Endgame. And the harder they’d try to pretend Infinity War never happened, which seems to be the overall gist of the first trailer, the worse for the fans who are aware of Marvel’s timeline of events.
Not to mention that Spider-Man is still one of the most popular heroes out there, which means that even without too many trailers and TV spots, it’s likely crush the box office this summer. In fact, it might do even better than expected for a Spider-Man movie solely because Endgame precedes it. Just as Endgame helped Captain Marvel at the box office, the epic conclusion of MCU Phase 3 will also boost Far From Home’s numbers. We will all want to see what happens in the MCU after the dust settles, and Spider-Man 2 is going to be the first film to explore that. Moreover, Sony will have more than two months between Avengers 4 and Far From Home to promote the new film, since Spider-Man 2 is out on July 5th. And the more controversial the Endgame finale is, the bigger the hype will be for Far From Home.
