You'll Recognize These MCU Villains Returning To Endgame

Marvel has been incredibly careful about making sure that no real Avengers: Endgame spoilers slip out prior to the film's April 26th release, instituting strict controls over access to the script, and scaring the stars into complete radio silence.

So it's kind of ironic that one big spoiler might have gotten out thanks to Marvel accidentally including it in their own trailers!

Yes, it's true. Eagle-eyed fans pouring over every frame of the recent Avengers: Endgame trailer discovered that there's apparently a discrepancy between the normal version and the 3-D version — and that difference reveals the return of some bad guys from Avengers: Infinity War.

It happens during the scene where Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye runs down a tunnel to escape a big explosion. Nothing spoilery there, right?

But Reddit user andresgarcia102 discovered that in the 3-D version of the trailer, two figures can be seen chasing him. Based on the appearance of the figures, it appears as though the bad guys are none other than the Outriders — the henchmen in Thanos's employ who aided in the assault on Wakanda during Infinity War.

What's interesting here isn't just the fact that the Outriders seem to be rearing their ugly, xenomorph-esque heads in Endgame — it's also that they aren't seen in the 2D Endgame trailer, only in the 3D footage. This suggests pretty strongly that Marvel may have purposefully altered the footage in the normal trailer in order to prevent any spoilers from leaking. But apparently this detail was missed when they were editing the 3D version — and naturally, Marvel's rabid Avengers fans discovered it right away.

This is far from the first time Marvel filmmakers — namely Joe and Anthony Russo, who are responsible for Infinity War, Endgame, and Captain America: Civil War — have screwed around with footage in their trailers as a means to keep plot details protected.

Most famously, the first trailers for Infinity War included a sequence where the Avengers team, which had assembled to defend Wakanda, included the Hulk. However, Hulk isn't anywhere to be seen during the climactic battle, because he refused to participate, forcing Bruce Banner to fight using Iron Man's Hulkbuster armor.

Co-director Anthony Russo admitted that they made up the scene with the Hulk just for the trailer.

"That shot [...] was never in the movie in the version that you saw. It was never even created for the movie in that version. It was literally created in that version for the trailer."

And his brother, co-director Joe Russo, said they do that stuff all the time.

"We look at the trailer as a very different experience than the movie, and I think audiences are so predictive now that you have to be very smart about how you craft a trailer because an audience can watch a trailer and basically tell you what’s gonna happen in the film. [...] So at our disposal are lots of different shots that aren’t in the movie that we can manipulate through CG to tell a story that we want to tell specifically for the purpose of the trailer and not for the film."

That does raise the possibility that the presence of these Outriders are also an elaborate fake-out. But considering they aren't in the normal version of the trailer, it seems more likely that they were erased from that version rather than added to the 3D version.

Whatever the case, the big takeaway is that even if this spoiler turns out to be correct, you should take everything in the trailer with a grain of salt, because any part of it could be bogus. Some fans, for instance, are already speculating that the shot of Tony Stark walking with the team in the 2nd trailer is a fake-out — and we know that scene was heavily edited one way or another, because a different version with different characters appeared in the first Super Bowl teaser.

There's only one way to know the truth, of course, so… we'll see you in the theaters. Looks like the trailers did their job after all.

#Marvel #AvengersEndgame #MCU #Avengers