For those of you who have seen Avengers: Infinity War with your own two eyes, you’ll know that Bruce Banner spends much of the movie attempting to court Hulk out of hiding, after the green gamma giant came up against Thanos and lost. Quite spectacularly, we might add.
And so begins a movie-long quest to unleash Marvel’s Jade Giant, even if Banner’s desperate pleas are ultimately in vain. But what about the slow-motion trailer shot of Hulk charging into battle alongside Captain America, Black Widow, and Black Panther?
Turns out it was created solely for the purpose of Infinity War‘s previews, as the Russo Brothers have been pretty forthcoming about using smoke and mirrors in order to throw everyone off the scent. As for Hulk, specifically, Joe Russo recently told those in attendance at last week’s Smithsonian Associates event that Bruce Banner’s raging alter-ego must be handled with care.
We have to be careful with the character of Banner. Because if every time he’s in trouble Hulk saves him, Hulk becomes the hero and he becomes whiny. We wanted to force Banner to be the hero.
Elsewhere, both directors appeared on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast (h/t Collider) to discuss all things Infinity War and, sure enough, one of the topics that came up in conversation involved the used of trailer misdirects.
Said Joe Russo:
We use all the material that we have at our disposal to create a trailer. We look at the trailer as a very different experience than the movie, and I think audiences are so predictive now that you have to be very smart about how you craft a trailer because an audience can watch a trailer and basically tell you what’s gonna happen in the film. We consume too much content. So 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.
On the heels of a huge second weekend, Avengers: Infinity War may be destined for a global haul in excess of $2 billion, in which case it’ll become only the fourth movie to achieve such an eye-watering feat after Avatar, Titanic, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
