Endgame crossed two billion dollars worldwide this weekend, which is a genuinely insane number for a movie that came out barely more than a week ago. I'm not going to write a box office recap, there are a hundred sites doing that better than I could with actual sourcing on the studio numbers. What I want to talk about is the five days I spent basically at war with my own phone trying not to find out what happens in it before I could get to a theater.
I saw it the Tuesday after opening weekend, at the 9:40pm showing at the mostly-empty AMC off Route 9, because that was the earliest my schedule actually allowed. Five days is an eternity in internet time. Five days is long enough for someone in your own group chat to type "not to spoil it but" and then, functionally, spoil it. So I did what I always do before a big release now, which is spend twenty minutes turning my apps into a padded room.
Step one was Twitter's mute filter, which honestly more people should know exists. Settings and privacy, then Notifications, then Muted, then Muted words. You can add a whole list and it'll hide any tweet containing them, not just from notifications but from your home timeline too if you check that box (people miss that box, it's not the default). I muted Endgame, Thanos, Cap, Tony, Hawkeye, RIP, snap, and, after nearly getting got by a headline, the word "returns." Set the duration to two weeks and forgot about it.
Step two was a browser extension called Spoiler Shield, which does roughly the same trick but for your Facebook feed too, blurring out any post matching your keyword list until you click through it on purpose. It's a little clunky and occasionally blurs something dumb, like a friend's unrelated post about her actual cat named Thanos, but a false positive is a small price for peace of mind.
Step three, and this is the one that actually annoyed me, was Google. I searched something completely unrelated to Marvel on Tuesday afternoon and a news result three rows down had a major plot point sitting right in the URL slug, visible on the results page itself before I'd even clicked anything. No mute filter catches that. That one's on the outlets, honestly, and it's not new, they did the same thing after the Game of Thrones episode two weeks earlier. If you're going to embargo your headline you have to embargo your slug too, otherwise the whole exercise is theater.
Reddit was actually the easiest part, which surprised me. I just left r/marvelstudios and r/movies alone for the week. Out of sight, out of mind, and neither of those subs was going to pop up in my regular scroll if I wasn't visiting them.
None of this is foolproof. My coworker walked past my desk Monday morning with his laptop open to some entertainment site and I caught about four words of a headline in his browser tab before I looked away, fast, like it was radioactive. It wasn't enough to ruin anything, but my heart still did a stupid little jump. That's the tradeoff with this whole approach: you're trying to filter a firehose using a colander, and every so often something gets through anyway. The only real fix is seeing the movie faster, and not everyone's schedule cooperates with a global release date the way the internet's outrage cycle does.
I'll say this too, because it's been bugging me for a few years now and this was just the worst version of it yet: we've built an entire social media ecosystem that runs on immediate reaction, and immediate reaction is fundamentally incompatible with anyone experiencing a piece of media on their own timeline. Twitter wants you live-tweeting the theater the second you walk out. The people who actually respect a spoiler window are doing it against the grain of how the platforms are built, not because of it.
Anyway. It was worth it. I'm not spoiling anything here either, don't worry, you're safe on this blog at least, that's a promise I can actually keep since I control every word on this page myself.