Finally, at long last, we have a trailer for “Thor: Love and Thunder.”
We’ve got our first glance at what the MCU’s God of Thunder has been up to since sauntering off to space at the end of “Avengers: Endgame.” He’s lost some weight, he’s doing some space pirating, hanging out with the Greek pantheon. And, in the meantime, Jane Foster is running around with a newly reforged Mjolnir.
Or is any of that true?
Once upon a time, I delighted in parsing through every frame of the latest MCU trailer, looking for clues about what the plot may entail. It’s a paradoxical impulse. The closer a movie gets to release, the less I want to know about it for risk of spoilers ruining the theatrical experience. Yet, that inverse relationship works the other way as well. The further out a movie is, the more I want to know about it.
So how come I haven’t been watching every frame of the new Thor trailer?
Because Marvel lies.
Over the years, Marvel Studios has become quite adept at digitally altering trailers to obscure details or outright conceal certain aspects of the plot.
“Spider-Man: No Way Home” did this in multiple ways, using selective editing to change the context of Spider-Man’s dealings with Doctor Strange, to say nothing of the existence of two particular guest characters.
Before that was the “Avengers: Infinity War” trailer, which played all sorts of subtle tricks to mask the order of events of the movie. The number of Infinity Stones Thanos has in any particular scene is different between the trailer and the movie, to say nothing about the Hulk appearing in the trailer in scenes that he was not present in for the final product.
Going back to the previous Thor movie, the trailer for “Thor: Ragnarok” showed Hela confronting Thor and shattering his hammer in the streets of New York rather than the green fields of Norway. And, of course, the trailers didn’t spoil the fact that he would get himself a new hammer or lose an eye in the climatic battle.
It goes back further, but you get the idea. Which is exactly what Marvel Studios wants you to have. An idea.
Their trailers may give you a sense of the general tone of the movie and a basic idea of the plot, but there’s little point in speculating how the finer details will play out. There’s no way of knowing which scenes are faked and which are real until you’re in the theater.
On the one hand, knowing that there’s a fair chance that any particular detail from a trailer won’t be in the movie kind of takes the fun out of the build-up. A trailer comes out, you passively watch it to get a feel of what to expect, and that’s all you can really take away from it. There’s no puzzle to put together or any theories to hash out because just the possibility of a misleading clip in a trailer taints the credibility of the whole thing.
On the other hand, perhaps that’s for the best. Knowing that it’s futile to dive to deep into the details of the trailers eliminates the temptation to do so. Sure, you lose out on the fun of the speculation, but it’s also keeps me from inadvertently spoiling myself on the final product.
The bottom line is, I’m gonna go to the movie anyway. It’s a given. I don’t need the trailer to convince me to buy a ticket, so it doesn’t really matter what is or isn’t in it.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and really likes Thor’s new jacket. Hope that makes it to the final cut.
