Joseph Baxter
Paul Bradshaw

Sep 20, 2018

Snap speculation gets stoked after Anthony and Joe Russo release a photo that potentially teases… something

Marvel is such a tease. Avengers 4 directors Anthony and Joe Russo know full well that any tiny bit of information about the movie – and about what happened after the end of the last movie – will have fans all over the world weeping into their Spider-Man PJs. 

Sending a mysterious (and tastefully artistic) tweet from the set of the film, the Russos have given us our first clue about what to expect.  

“Look hard…” reads the tweet sent this morning from the directorial siblings’ joint Twitter account. The caption accompanies a black-and-white photo showing Joe – clearly on the Avengers 4 studio set – sitting in a collapsible chair typing away on his computer. So, what are supposed to “look hard” to see?

In the photo, Joe is facing an easel that’s holding what appears to be three pieces of concept art, but there’s nothing on those canvases that we can “look hard” enough to see. Also, the green screen in the background features upside down T’s, V’s and X’s, seemingly amounting to nothing. Moreover, the room is filled with the kind of everyday objects you’d normally expect to see on a studio set (providing us with the poignant detail that the Avengers 4 crew is fully stocked up on water bottles), and that there’s a tied cable bundle in the bottom-right that looks like Homer Simpson. Other than that, the Internet has nothing.

While there’s plenty of pessimistic whinging that claims the photo means nothing and that the Russos are simply trolling us (which could very well be the case,) the MCU fandom is, nevertheless, obsessively looking for anything that amounts to an intended clue, ideally one about the Avengers 4 plot. Interestingly, the fact that the Russos released this image the day after the arrival of the first Captain Marvel trailer could be a clue in its own right. Indeed, the March 8, 2019-scheduled film will fill an important part of the Avengers 4 puzzle just a few months before the mega sequel arrives.

What do you think? Is there an element in this image that reveals something, be it the aftermath of the heartbreaking you-know-what that Thanos initiated, Hawkeye and Ant-Man’s belated arrivals, an X-Men debut fueled by Disney’s acquisition of Fox, Captain Marvel’s time-jumped role in the fray, something about Adam Warlock finally showing up? Even another take on that Homer Simpson cable will do. 

Avengers 4 arrives in cinemas on May 3, 2019.