WARNING: slight spoilers for Captain America: Civil War ahead.
It’s only recently been released in cinemas, but Captain America: Civil War has been dominating at the box office, no doubt boosted massively by its critical acclaim with many saying that it’s the best Marvel production to date.
Having seen the film myself recently, I enjoyed it. I liked the messages it was trying to convey, the way they had masterfully built up tension throughout the preceding films (take a hint, Batman v Superman) in the MCU greatly enhanced the stakes in the dispute between Captain America and Iron Man, and the action scenes were as bombastic and enthralling as what we expect from our modern comic book movies.
Would I say I loved it? No.
Why? The marketing campaign.
To say that Marvel had been slightly overzealous with Civil War would be an understatement. Instead of drip-feeding the public with trailers and plot points, they bombarded them, myself included. Wherever I went, there was a new exclusive scene published on a YouTube movie channel, in-depth interviews with the cast in print and online, and TV spots giving away yet more information. I lapped it up.
With all the -admittedly quite brilliant- trailers still swirling in my mind before I took to my seat at the cinema, I quickly realised that overexposure had made everything too predictable.
I knew exactly who was on whose side, making it hard to care about much before the divided Avengers eventually clashed. When they did square off, I knew War Machine was going to be the worst off after he was left crumpled and battered on the ground in the trailers. Worse yet, I knew there was still more conflict to come in a vital sequence of the third act, purely because this emotional moment from Civil War‘s marketing had yet to happen:
Overexposure didn’t make the film bad in my eyes, it didn’t even necessarily make it worse. It just made it harder for me to fall in love with it.
I am part of the problem, though.
If I wasn’t one of the many, many people to buy one ticket for the hype train every time a big franchise makes a return, the people behind the scenes wouldn’t feel the need to flood cinemagoers with immersion-breaking plot points. Do you remember when it was revealed in a trailer that Doomsday would be making an appearance in BvS, effectively “spoiling” the whole storyline of the movie? It was because we all clamour for new threads for us to stitch it all together on our own – Hollywood execs realise this and capitalise on it. Every big-budget trailer is now made for the internet to feverishly disassemble and analyse every aspect of it. Nothing is by accident when it comes to selling a film in this day and age.
That’s why am I refusing to allow myself to be sucked in by the new trailer that “you just have to see” or the leaked on-set photos of actors in character ever again. I have actually already been doing this with my games – I have been “going in blind” with a lot of the underground offerings on PlayStation Now and have no preconceptions or background information to sway my experience. It’s genuinely liberating.
Next time I see Marvel have released a trailer for the next film which could be their best (which, incidentally, is Guardians of the Galaxy), or a huge spoiler supposedly leaking on some YouTube channel, I am going to tear up my ticket for the hype train and let the product itself do the talking.
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