Is anything real any more? For the last few weeks there have been rumours that Marvel is about to drop the first official footage for its forthcoming superhero epic Avengers: Doomsday, ahead of screenings of Avatar: Fire and Ash. And it makes a sort of sense: the latest instalment of James Cameron’s 3D mega-project about blue aliens and colonial shame is clearly a visual spectacle, so why not lure fans of Captain America and Thor into cinemas by dangling the promise of a Doomsday trailer in front of them? In a world in which everyone expects everything to be online instantly, could the most radical experiment be to put this thing in cinemas?
If it once seemed like a good idea, it increasingly looks less so. There are rumoured to be multiple Doomsday trailers in circulation, to be ushered in ahead of select screenings of Fire and Ash. But several appear to have leaked online already, which means most Avengers superfans are now getting their first glimpse of the new movie through a prism of phone footage and compression artefacts. Audiences at early showings of Cameron’s film, meanwhile, have reported not seeing any Avengers trailer, though some insist they definitely saw something, briefly.
