Avengers: Endgame, the most ambitious crossover event in cinematic history, is now in theaters, and no one is safe, from spoilers. Not even the half of the universe that survived Thanos’s feted “snap”.
Google searches for “how to avoid spoilers” have reached a record high, reports the Guardian. The second and third-highest spikes on the timeline below line up with the releases of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018).
Various media outlets have published guides to avoiding spoilers, but between the leaked film footage and younger generations’ taste for irony-soaked memes, even the most fastidious can’t guarantee living spoiler-free. One Twitter user even complained that some malicious pranksters had attached the leaked footage at the end of a popular meme from the videogame Marvel vs Capcom 2.
Marvel Studios has taken note, rolling out a social media campaign to get viewers to keep mum. A Friday morning tweet by Mark Ruffalo with the hashtag #DontSpoilTheEndgame garnered 26,000 likes in two hours; a video by Marvel featuring the cast of the film – tagline: “Don’t do it” – has been seen 2.6m times in 26 hours, all in the hopes that people will keep the spoilers to themselves.