If you have a bunch of favorite moments in the various awesome trailers for Avengers: Infinity War, get ready for a shock: Many of those scenes are not in the movie at all. Seriously. No spoilers yet, but you should prepare yourself not to expect what you’ve been primed to expect. Here’s why.
There are no specific spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War in this post. Just a primer on the fact that the trailers have been intentionally misleading.
In the past several years, it hasn’t been uncommon for trailers of huge films not to match up with the exact same scene in the final cut. Infamously, the 2008 trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull depicted Harrison Ford giving a totally different line delivery to the phrase “part time” than he did in the film. This is true of one of the earliest music video/trailers for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in which Natalie Portman screamed, “Get to your ships!!” In the actual film, she said this with way less urgency, more like it was a suggestion than a command.
Hell, back in 1991, the trailers for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country had a brief scene that heavily implied Captain Kirk was going to get shot and killed. In the actual film, a shapeshifter doppelgänger posing as Kirk is shot and killed, but the angle of the scene and tone is totally different. With these examples, it’s not totally clear if the audience was being specifically misled or not, and in cases like Rogue One, the MASSIVE number of scenes in the trailers that aren’t in the film can be totally chalked up to the reshoot debacle.
But, the Marvel movies are playing a totally different game now. Instead, the more contemporary trailers for the movies in the MCU are actually trying to trick you. This was true of Thor: Ragnarok, which had several scenes in the trailer which weren’t in the movie, some of which seemed to be manipulated on purpose. Those trailers made us think Thor’s hammer was destroyed in New York, but in the film, it happens in Norway.
And then there’s the early Infinity War trailers in which Thor has two eyes because, of course, the twist of him losing an eye in Ragnarok was being kept secret. Spider-Man: Homecoming’s trailer featured an iconic shot of Spidey and Iron Man swooping through Queens, but that shot was created just for the trailers and wasn’t in the final film.
All of this is literally the tip of the iceberg with Avengers: Infinity War, though. Some of the most iconic moments in the trailers are not only not in the movie, there’s not even a context in which those scenes could have occurred. Make no mistake, this isn’t because of reshoots. Marvel is doing this on purpose.
Which, in a sense, is brilliant. You think you know what is going to happen in this movie, but you don’t.
Avengers: Infinity War is out everywhere on Thursday night, April 26.
