With its enigmatic promo run for Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel has perfected the trailer that reveals precisely nothing. Teasers have consisted of portentous glances, mood lighting, and characters standing very still. Dialogue is pre-scrubbed of context. Music swells with the confidence that something enormous is happening just out of frame. Plot, meanwhile, has been placed in witness protection. The studio is clearly well aware that giving away even a smidgen of detail this early on – the film isn’t due for release until December – would result in fans cracking the code long before any bums actually go on seats.
After all, Marvel has been here before. Avengers: Infinity War’s trailers laid out just enough narrative scaffolding for the internet to calmly conclude, months in advance, that Thanos was going to win and leave the universe in binary tatters. And it happened again with Avengers: Endgame, a film whose storyline was deduced from toy leaks, casting announcements and the radical insight that actors rarely sign multi-picture deals only for their characters to die permanently.
