Avengers: Endgame Super Bowl teaser breakdown: where's Captain Marvel?

In the mid-2000s, when JJ Abrams showcased his now-trademark "mystery box" approach to film-making – and, just as importantly, film marketing – Hollywood became increasingly wary about just how much its trailers should trail. Fast-forward to the present, and Disney’s promotional campaign for Avengers: Endgame is taking the tantalising technique to its logical conclusion: by showing audiences effectively nothing at all from their forthcoming Marvel blockbuster, it feels like everything’s at stake. Nevertheless, after 11 years of cinematic universe-building, even innocuous-seeming props, backdrops and turns of phrase can yield valuable clues. After combing through the 30 seconds of new footage unveiled during the 2019 Super Bowl, here’s what we learned:

Survivor roll-call

The teaser opens in the aftermath of The Decimation: Thanos’s cataclysmic finger-snap at the end of Infinity War, which wiped out half of all life in the universe. Spider-Man, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, the Guardians of the Galaxy (with two exceptions) and Nick Fury were among the high-profile casualties, but a handful of heroes remain, including the entire original Avengers team.

Seven of these figures are seen striding purposefully through the team’s hangar-like HQ in the final shot: they’re in silhouette, so it’s hard to identify who’s who, but we suspect Captain America (Chris Evans) is in the lead, followed by Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), then a small gap, then War Machine (Don Cheadle) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) bringing up the rear.

Nebula (Karen Gillan) is accounted for in a brief earlier shot, where we see her repairing the team’s ship with a suitless Tony Stark. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is shown outside Avengers HQ with three teammates in the dark, staring up at something big, and there’s a suiting-up shot of Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) alongside Cheadle’s Rhodey. That covers every major survivor we’re aware of, but it wouldn’t be beyond Marvel to misdirect, or even downright fib, to throw us off the scent…

Empty spaces are waiting to be filled

Understandably, the teaser makes a big deal of all the empty space left behind by Thanos’s billions of victims: the opening images of New York City include a lightless skyline, a deserted baseball stadium, and clusters of boats moored around the Statue of Liberty. (Perhaps the landmark became a rallying point for those left behind.) And a poster in an assembly hall, featuring the heroes’ shadows and the words “What will we do now they’re gone?” hammers home the mood of apocalyptic despair.

But there are a couple of human-sized gaps that we suspect might be red herrings. The first is in the shot of Banner, Rhodey, Steve Rogers and Natasha walking across the grass at night: for a moment that’s presumably supposed to show a small group of heroes utterly united in purpose, there’s an uncomfortable gap between Ruffalo and Cheadle. And the other is in the (smaller, but still conspicuous) gap between what looks like Downey Jr and Cheadle in the climactic purposeful walk through the hangar. The teasers for Infinity War featured a handful of shots which were significantly different to the versions that appeared in the finished film: one was the iconic rush to battle in Wakanda, which showed Banner in Hulk form, rather than clad in Iron Man’s Hulkbuster armour, as he was in the actual scene.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo have said in the past that they insert misleading shots into trailers: “At our disposal are lots of different shots that aren’t in the movie that we can manipulate through CG to tell a story that we want to tell specifically for the purpose of the trailer and not for the film,” Joe told the Happy Sad Confused podcast around a year ago. So while it might sound paranoid in the extreme, we’re fairly certain that one crucial detail has been airbrushed out of the latest footage.

Missing person

The most obvious contender is Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, whose solo film will be released this March, a month and a half before Avengers: Endgame. We still know very little about how Captain Marvel (AKA Carol Danvers) fits into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, other than that her origin story takes place during the Nineties, and that she becomes the Avengers’ last hope of thwarting Thanos: it’s her stars-and-stripes logo that pops up on the pager clutched by Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury at the very end of Infinity War while he disintegrates in the street.

Since a digitally de-aged Fury features heavily in the Captain Marvel film, it seems eminently possible that he tasks Danvers with somehow sabotaging Thanos’s nefarious plan before it’s even executed – the 14,000,605-to-one chance of success foreseen by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in Infinity War before he too bit/became the dust.

Other Infinity War survivors remain missing in action: we know Black Panther’s Okoye (Danai Gurira) and M’Baku (Winston Duke) both made it, and it’s highly possible Shuri (Letitia Wright) did too, even though a digital display in the previous Endgame teaser suggested she was among the deceased. But those displays also featured a mugshot of Scott Lang/Ant-Man – who most certainly is alive and kicking. However, it seems unlikely that Shuri’s survival would merit a painstaking digital cover-up, unless she’s wearing a costume that would give away Marvel’s plans for Phase Four of the franchise.

Coastal retreat

We’re familiar with the Avengers’ base and Tony’s ship, but it’s hard to work out where the rest of the teaser is set. The sequence in which Natasha practices her shooting skills could also be at the team’s HQ – there’s a body of water visible through the window, and from the previous films, we know it stands close to a lake. But the shot of Rocket opening a door looks like it takes place somewhere completely different: again, there’s water in the background, but the door is wooden and weathered, and the lobster pots outside suggest a remoter, more clandestine spot.

Then there’s that quick, odd shot of Thor emerging from a cave and holding a mysterious, vaguely umbrella-shaped artefact. The basalt-like rock formations could be Wakandan technology, but the landscape outside is reminiscent of the briefly glimpsed pastoral hillsides on which Thanos seemed to be planning to spend his post-apocalyptic retirement.

'Some people move on.' 'But not us. Not us.'

The nine words of voiceover don’t tell us much, but the identity of the speaker – or could it be speakers, plural? – might. The pacing of the line suggests it’s been cut together from fragments of dialogue culled from a longer exchange, and the drawling pronunciation of “on” sounds distinctly Josh Brolin-esque – so perhaps the first four words could be Thanos’s own, goading the remaining Avengers for fighting back, yet again, against something the arch-villain assumes can’t be rewound.

The final five, meanwhile, have the heroic ring of a Steve Rogers rallying call, which suggests this will be a battle Captain America will fight to the bitter end. Given we know that Evans is being written out of the franchise after Endgame, this is just the latest hint that the fourth Avengers film will entail Cap’s demise. Have we already heard our hero’s last words? Don’t bet against it.