Kevin Feige Explains Why Avengers: Endgame’s Title Was An Infinity War Spoiler

Never has so much speculation been made over the mere name of a film than for the movie formerly known as “Avengers 4,” with the forums flooding throughout 2018 with rumors and theories on what the official title could be and when we might find out. The build-up to the unveiling of the name Avengers: Endgame got so intense that even Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige had to admit that the choice to keep the title under wraps “sort of backfired” by ensuring that no title could possibly live up to all the hype they’d created around it.

What really piqued the curiosity of fans early on about the Avengers 4 title was Feige’s claim back in 2017 that it would be a spoiler for Avengers: Infinity War. And while it’s debatable that the word “Endgame” really gives away all that much about last year’s ensemble actioner, Feige holds firm that the title was a little too revealing about the way Infinity War concluded, telling Collider:

“Well, I think I’d said that it all had gotten blown out of proportion to some extent. But it was a spoiler, because if you knew before Infinity War came out that the next movie was called Endgame, then you know that there wasn’t an ending to Infinity War. But that had been the title of the movie from the moment we conceived of doing the two films. In large part, because…it’s seeded right there. I mean, it’s seeded in Ultron.”

Sure enough, once the official title was revealed last December, fans were quick to point out a passage of dialogue in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron where Tony Stark refers to the “hostile alien army” they encountered in 2012’s The Avengers as “the endgame.”

Evidently, Marvel Studios was sitting on this title for a good long while before they shared it with the rest of us, but in the months since the grand unveiling, fans haven’t exactly lacked for subjects to speculate over. Most recently, for instance, Feige got the internet talking with his suggestion that another Avengers: Endgame trailer could be dropping soon, but regardless of what the coming weeks bring, all will finally be revealed when the film hits theaters on April 26th, 2019.