Over the years, we've become used to trailers which feature scenes or dialogue which don't wind up in the theatrical cut (I'm looking at you, ROGUE ONE), and the trailers for AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR were no exception. One of the major shots featured Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson), Bucky (Sebastian Stan), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and more leading the slow-motion charge towards the camera during the Battle of Wakanda.
It was a fun moment, but the scene wasn't in the film; in fact, as director's Joe and Anthony Russo revealed while speaking on Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast, it was an intentional misdirect crafted purely for the trailers.
We use all the material that we have at our disposal to create a trailer. We look at the trailer as a very different experience than the movie, and I think audiences are so predictive now that you have to be very smart about how you craft a trailer because an audience can watch a trailer and basically tell you what’s gonna happen in the film. We consume too much content. So, you know, at our disposal are lots of different shots that aren’t in the movie that we can manipulate through CG to tell a story that we want to tell specifically for the purpose of the trailer and not for the film.
Anthony Russo added that the "shot that you’re referencing was never in the movie in the version that you saw. It was never even created for the movie in that version. It was literally created in that version for the trailer." Another trailer moment which didn't make it to the version we saw in theaters was Thano's (Josh Brolin) line, "Fun isn’t something one considers when balancing the universe, but this does put a smile on my face." However, unlike the big hero shot, this line was meant to be in the movie, but was changed during post-production. "That was a scripted line for the movie that we replaced with another line that we thought was a little more specific to the storytelling with Gamora," Joe Russo said. "I think he used to say that on Nowhere to Gamora when he emerged from the Reality Cloak as the Aether exposed him. And I think we changed it to something that was a little more specific to the storytelling."
AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR is now playing in theaters.