The Russos won't say how many stingers Endgame has and almost everyone prefers bearded Cap

By Sam Barsanti | April 7, 2019 | 10:39pm

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The Russos won't say how many stingers Endgame has and almost everyone prefers bearded Cap

Pretty much everyone but Bradley Cooper Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney

Marvel is still refusing to reveal any real spoilers for Avengers: Endgame, beyond any of the recent teasers at least, and so it’s not particularly surprising that a press conference for Endgame in Los Angeles today featuring most of the surviving heroes (plus directors Joe and Anthony Russo and studio head Kevin Feige) leaned pretty hard on relatively meaningless softball questions and general “are you guys all best friends in real life?” stuff. Luckily, everybody loves the Avengers, so meaningless softballs and questions about them being friends are still pretty cool.

New York Times writer Kyle Buchanan was there to report on stuff like the the Russos saying that they like to end their Marvel movies by writing themselves into a corner (which makes sense, given that Winter Soldier ended with the destruction of S.H.I.E.L.D., Civil War ended with the Avengers effectively disbanded, and Infinity War ended with, well, the snap). Also, Chris Evans once again forgot that nobody’s supposed to know that Captain America will definitely die, making some reference to “the completion” of his character’s arc in Endgame that caused moderator Jon Favreau to suggest that they “just talk about Scott Pilgrim instead” (Evans was in Scott Pilgrim with fellow Avenger Brie Larson).

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Later, Scarlett Johansson kindly offered a tie-in with today’s entry in The A.V. Club’s ongoing series The Marvel Moment by noting that Black Widow started as a “sexy secretary with a skillset on the side” in Iron Man 2 who became “one of the boys, for better or worse” in Avengers. These days, she’s happy that the character has grown a bit as the MCU itself has become less of a “testosterone fest.”

Brie Larson also revealed that she filmed her Endgame scenes before Captain Marvel, and that apparently all of the Avengers play Boggle together. Evans noted that Larson and Don Cheadle are the best, but Mark Ruffalo is a big dummy who can’t do words no good.

But let’s get to the real stuff: The vast majority of Avengers actors prefer Captain America with a beard, which is the correct answer. It’s too bad he’s probably going to die beardless in this next movie, huh?

The Russo brothers also refused to answer “whether Avengers: Endgame has mid- or end-credit scenes,” saying they don’t want to “give any context away.”

That’s absurd, because it has to have at least one stinger or else it’s not a Marvel Studios movie, but their refusal to say if there’s more than one is kind of interesting. After all, you can make some tonal guesses based on how many stingers a movie has, since, say, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 was a fun movie and had a bunch of stingers throughout the credits, while Infinity War was a serious movie that only had one stinger. Marvel is pretending that everyone who died in the last movie is going to stay dead, so they’re not going to tease whether there will be a happy ending by saying how many stingers there will be. Kind of interesting, right?