No secrets revealed
How do you talk about the biggest movie of the year when no one has seen the biggest movie of the year? Eric Volmers
‘It might be best for you to see it, so I’m going to talk about bass fishing, okay?” That was Chris Pratt’s response to a typically geeky question at a star-studded news conference for Avengers: Infinity War. Pratt, who returned to the big screen on Friday as Peter Quill/ Star-Lord in the sprawling Marvel Universe mashup, was asked about how his character feels about seeing humans for the first time in 30 years.
As promised, Pratt proceeded to discuss his bass-fishing preferences rather than risk anything that might be construed as a spoiler for the next Avengers blockbuster – which is being hyped as an eraclosing culmination of 10 years of Marvel Universe films. Of course, at the time of the press conference, virtually no one had seen the finished film, neither the gathered press nor most of the cast on stage.
Its red carpet prèmiere was more than 24 hours away. Which all lead to the surreal spectacle of 21 of the Marvel Universe’s biggest movie stars, plus directors Joe and Anthony Russo and Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige, struggling to discuss a film they couldn’t discuss and trying to answer questions they couldn’t answer.
What little we do know about the story is that it focuses on the ultimate Marvel Universe villain Thanos (Josh Brolin), and his attempts to gather six magical “Infinity Stones,” which have unimaginable power and will presumably put earth and other parts of the universe in peril should they fall into his large hands. Since he is far too big a threat for one team of superheroes to handle, the fractured Avengers are joined by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Spider-Man (Tom Holland), the Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman).
In an earlier interview, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely confirmed that few of the actors had actually read the screenplay all the way through. The secrecy over plot points has led to a good deal of speculation among bloggers and other members of the press. Some of it has focused on the fate of Captain America, who had a falling out with Tony Stark/Iron Man in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. Actor Chris Evans, who sports a beard in Avengers: Infinity War and was conspicuously absent from Sunday’s conference, has said he wants to retire his Captain America after Infinity War’s 2019 as-yet untitled Avengers sequel.
Perhaps aware that the actors assembled on stage were unable to reveal much about anything, the Marvel/Disney organizers of the press conference gave it even more of a game-show vibe than normal. Actor Jeff Goldblum, who played the amusing Grandmaster in Thor: Ragnarok, was enlisted to moderate the festivities. That entailed him spinning a hopper full of balls as a way of setting up how the actors could be questioned. Each ball had a question or name of an actor the press could then address. To add to the carnivalesque atmosphere, Goldblum also took to throwing the balls around the room, even managing to accidentally bean a not-entirely-amused Robert Downey Jr. on the head at one point.
The closest to any concrete information we got was from Downey, the actor who was there at the very beginning of the whole overlapping Marvel Universe phenomenon in 2008’s Iron Man. He was simply asked if he would be appearing in the fourth instalment of the Avengers, which has already been filmed. “You never know,” he said. “I’m going to see it on the screen tomorrow. If I die tomorrow, I’m going to be confused.”