Remember when Avengers: Infinity War premiered in 2018 and Marvel made a whole marketing beat about Thanos “demanding” fans’ silence so as not to spoil the movie for others? Well, a lot can change in seven years, I guess. Marvel has made a whole marketing campaign out of spoiling the latest MCU movie, Thunderbolts*, just days after it was released on May 2.
The spoiler involves the asterisk in the film’s name which implies a working title of some kind. In the film itself, the name “Thunderbolts” refers to a soccer team Yelena (Florence Pugh) was part of as a child, which her father, Red Guardian (David Harbour), uses as a placeholder name for their team of misfit toys. At the very end, the group is rebranded as the “New Avengers,” officially relaunching the superhero team after its previous lineup disbanded following the events of Avengers: Endgame. Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) leads the team, which makes sense considering he’s the only person who was around as part of the initial group when Thanos was destroying half the known universe, but as seen in the post-credits scene, not every Avengers alumnus is thrilled by this development. Captain America (Anthony Mackie) is suing the group for copyright infringement after he was shown to be in talks to lead a new team under the Avengers banner in Brave New World. So it seems like there will be some tension between the group and other heroes in Avengers: Doomsday next year.
Once the group is deemed the New Avengers, the end credits sequence reveals the film’s new, true title: The New Avengers. It’s a clever gimmick that finally contextualizes the asterisk in the movie’s original title. However, it wasn’t enough for Marvel to introduce a New Avengers team through the back door of what appeared to be more of a B-plot film about some of the outcasts of the MCU; the company is also making this a marketing beat and spoiling the movie after one weekend. This isn’t just sequestered into trailers or social media videos; real-world billboards for the film are being updated for people to stumble upon out in the wild.
I’m torn because, as a marketing campaign, it’s pretty great. From the outside, Thunderbolts* was already fighting an uphill battle as a team-up movie of mostly side heroes in a franchise that no longer has the same cultural cache it once did. So it’s fun to see the movie rebranded as something more seemingly central to the overall MCU as a cheeky acknowledgement of the “oh, you thought you could skip this one?” feeling that has followed it. But also, this movie is only days old, and Marvel is using its massive platform to just spoil it outright for anyone who didn’t have the time or cash to swing by the theater on opening weekend. I’m staunchly against a company trying to control the narrative and tell people not to talk about something they paid money to see (within reason), but I feel even weirder about Marvel making that executive decision collectively for its audience.
Spoiler culture has gotten out of hand, and people’s almost phobia-like aversion to even pretty basic narrative details has made it almost impossible to talk about media without a comical amount of self-policing in public spaces. But I don’t know if Marvel is the company to take a big, subversive swing on the matter just 72 hours after a movie launched. Maybe there’s something to be said about how the “Thanos demands your silence” nonsense was a trailblazer and that other companies have followed suit in the years since. Maybe Thunderbolts* could be a pivot point that encourages people to stop taking spoiler culture so seriously. But maybe it could have waited one more week or so. Some of us were busy last weekend, Kevin Feige.