It Was a Mistake to Not Include the ‘Avengers’ Trailer After ‘Captain America’

I loved Captain America. I had known very little about Cap aside from what I’d read of the Civil War series, and I thought that he was just some overblown, macho, maybe even conservative masked hero. But the movie was fantastic; it beefed up the origin story with ties to the other reboots and is just a great 1940s-era film.

I’ll write about it more as the week goes on, but this post is about what happened after the credits… or rather, what didn’t happen. We were all waiting excitedly for the Avengers teaser we knew was coming, since other outlets had reported it. But after we sat through the fun reprisal of “Star-Spangled Man (with a Plan)” (by Alan Menken!), all we got was this message: Captain America will return in The Avengers.

It was a missed opportunity; while we were all critics, it was clear that the majority of us were comic book fans who would have written favorably about seeing the real teaser and not a grainy bootleg version online. My boyfriend thought maybe the bigwigs in charge of the screening were worried that we reporters would reveal every minute detail we could glean.

However, I was able to contain my disappointment a little better than the other film critics, who booed at the blank screen. They apparently didn’t know that the trailer has been posted online since the beginning of the week. In fact, here it is again for those crybabies:

So maybe it was a sort of punishment for someone — fan, critic, I’m not sure — leaking the trailer on Monday. Maybe they’re saving it for the midnight screening on Thursday night. It is the test of a real fan, isn’t it — see if the film critic who saw the movie free will shell out the $14 to watch Captain America again in order to access the post-credits teaser.