Big news over the weekend. Mark Ruffalo revealed the Avengers 4 title, and then got fired by the Russo brothers.
None of that is remotely true, of course, since it was just part of a gag on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, but that hasn’t stopped the rumour mill from kicking into overdrive.
Appearing on the US chat show, Ruffalo joked about his track record with Marvel spoilers, looking a bit sheepish as he reminded everyone that he once ruined the end of Avengers: Infinity War during a televised interview. “Don Cheadle will no longer do press with me,” he says, looking slightly serious for a second. “Marvel have a lot of reach in the world… and I’ve learned my lesson”.
Fallon plays along and the interview turns into a gag when he asks Ruffalo if he has any more Marvel news he can “spoil”. Ruffalo then pretends to give away the ending to Avengers 4 and tells everyone the new title – all bleeped out to stop us hearing.
After the show, The Russo brothers tweeted Ruffalo to tell him he was fired and everyone had a good laugh:
As with anything to do with Marvel news though, that’s not where the story finished. Clearly, Ruffalo said something to the studio audience when they bleeped over his audio, and there’s an outside chance that whatever he said was actually the real title of Avengers 4. Fallon’s show has been used for official announcements before, and Kevin Feige did hint that we’d get the new title after the Captain Marvel teaser landed – which happened weeks ago now.
Taking things a bit too far, one Twitter fan spent ages fiddling with the audio on the clip to try and decode the sound behind the bleep, posting a cleaned up version online that seemed to suggest Ruffalo was saying “The Last Avenger”.
There are two good reasons that this probably isn’t the real title. For a start, Ruffalo was almost certainly just having a laugh, probably saying “The Last Avengers” because it’s the funniest, most comically provocative punchline to the joke. Secondly, “Avengers: The Last Avenger” sounds really stupid, and no one is going to stand for that kind of grammatical repetition.
Surely we’re expecting the real title any day now? Until then, it looks like we’ll have to keep guessing.