Avengers: Endgame - What We Got Vs What Was Advertised

2. The Story & Tonal Differences

It's not just some of the major character beats that are very different to what was advertised, but large portions of the story and tone as well. For a start, let's revisit the idea of the footage being almost completely from the first 15-20 minutes. A lot of it is, but there's also a pretty decent chunk that's taken from quite late in the game, since they did show off quite a bit of the battle at the Avengers Compound: Iron Man, Cap, and Thor going to face Thanos, Cap strapping on his shield, and Ant-Man leaping off a pencil were all from there, albeit with some digital alterations. Nebula in battle, meanwhile, was from when they travel back to 2014.

But more than that is there was no hint in the trailers of how the story would go in order to get to such a point. Yes, we knew it'd be time travel (and even that isn't completely explicit in the advertising), but it wasn't clear what the exact purpose of it would be, where they'd be going, or what rules they'd establish. If anything, it was mostly assumed that they'd follow a more typical time travel narrative (they go back, change the past, and go back to the future), rather than all of the branching timelines we get here.

Tonally it's very different too. While Marvel films always have humour, there wasn't much of it in the trailers. Nor was there a sense of dread as with Infinity War's marketing. Instead, it was simply very dark, sad, and suggested that the theme of loss and attempts to move on would dominate proceedings. And to a degree, they do, but there is also a LOT of humour in the film, there are a huge number of lighter moments to counteract the dark, and also, with its time travel elements and things like, y'know, a rat saving the universe, it's also utterly ridiculous (in a good way, but still).