Avengers 4 Trailer: When Will Marvel Release The First Teaser?
And what if there isn't a trailer for The Russos' Infinity War follow-up?
It almost feels like the whole world is on hold at the minute. Time ebbs away painfully slowly, clocks seemingly stick or run backwards and you can pretty much hear the hairs blossoming out of the follicles in your own skin. That's what happens when you're promised something as exciting as the first Avengers 4 trailer and then nothing at all comes of it for ages.
For months now - well, let's be honest, since Infinity War came out and killed us all dead - there's been serious clamour for Marvel to just pull the trigger on the Avengers 4 teaser and get us all hyped for the coming sequel. There have been tiny teases so far, but beyond that, everything's been understandably locked down.
The problem for us as fans is that Marvel arguably don't even need to show us a trailer. Everything can be on their terms because of how successful Infinity War was and how dramatic the pause point was in the Thanos double-header. With so much to talk about, fans were already going to build hype themselves. And the studio had two other movies to promote anyway, so their attention was elsewhere.
Nevertheless, we have been promised - or reassured, that should probably be - that there is a trailer coming before the end of the year. In the past week, in fact, the whispers can grown into a deafening din that we're going to get it today. Or tomorrow. Or maybe Friday. Well, at the very least it must be coming in the next few days.
The worry here, of course, is that excitement is getting the better of everyone and there's an assumption that growing anticipation in the audience means something is going to happen at the studio's end. This is not the case, at all. The reality is that Marvel have now taken to trolling fans on social media rather than feeding information and the silence is becoming deafening. Whether that means it's the calm before the storm or just business as usual probably depends on how much you want to blindly believe a trailer is coming in the next hour. Or definitely the next day.
Luckily, there are some hints that a trailer IS imminent and they could point to a time very soon. And no, the fact that Collider are hosting a special screening for a select group of fans has no bearing. Because if there's one place Marvel WON'T debut it, it's there.
The biggest is the forthcoming release of the prelude comic, which is released on December 5th. There is surely no way a trailer would release after that comes out? That means that we CAN expect it to land in the next few days. It won't be too close to the Artemis Fowl trailer, because Disney won't want to crowd that when it has a difficult marketing campaign ahead of it anyway and Marvel don't tend to release trailers on weekends.
Thursday is the one most people have pointed towards, so maybe that's the big day?
But what if there's no trailer at all? It might sound unprecedented, but that's exactly what we've been told to expect from this marketing campaign. So far, in the interest of protecting spoilers, we've been given nothing at all in terms of concrete information. There's no title, no real synopsis and a complete lack of firm details that haven't been leaked - and even those have been few and far between and carry the caveat that there's apparently been some fake filming going on for misdirection purposes.
Actually choosing not to release a trailer would be a pretty brave thing, but it would also be smart. Imagine how much more talk it would generate if the only thing this mooted trailer reveal did was show something like Thanos snapping, a black screen and then the Avengers 4 title. And then that was it until the film came out... How incredible and hilariously provocative would that be?
The reality is that Marvel do not need a trailer like most movies do. They're midway through a story that MILLIONS of people went to see and loved - it's not like they can't count on that captive audience. And it's not like they're going to get new fans wandering in at the middle point of a story either. A trailer is almost redundant apart from as fan service. So why should they even bother?
Who's to say that that's not what they mean when they say this marketing campaign will be like nothing we've seen before? Would you really put it past the team that killed off half their own heroes and lied about them coming back? You probably shouldn't.
What do you think? Is the trailer coming soon? What do you want to see from it? Share your reactions below in the comments thread.