When I was a teenager I was a regular reader of movie magazines like Starburst, Fangoria and Starlog. I was a huge nerd (you may have guessed that I still am) and loved reading behind the scenes stuff about my favourite films. When I was offered the opportunity to review this movie special for ‘Avengers Endgame’ I felt pretty nostalgic for all those well-thumbed mags from my teen years (and yes, I do mean the movie magazines). Unfortunately, as a behind the scenes spectacular, this book completely fails in almost every regard. Turns out it’s quite hard to write an interesting book about a movie, when all the details of the movie are embargoed.
The book is a victim of the huge success of the Marvel Studios films. Given that the 4th Avengers movie’s title was only released a few weeks ago, the level of secrecy around every aspect of it was clearly significant. After the seismic shock of ‘Infinity War’ that probably isn’t surprising, but it also unfortunately it means that the book is so devoid of detail as to be almost pointless.
What we get, in the place of anything insightful about the film, is a series of interviews with Kevin Feige (president of Marvel Studios) and various members of the cast. These are all superficially about the film, but are really about the build-up to it. It’s no surprise that they’re self-congratulatory puff pieces, but the lack of any real information at all about the new movie is pretty staggering in a book that claims to be about it. There are the odd nuggets of interesting info in there (it was actually quite nice to hear from Feige, the mastermind of the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe) but none of it is about ‘Endgame’. There are some nice pictures though (just none that tell you anything about the film).
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