Movie opened internationally earlier than in the U.S, the reviews have been around for long enough..
International news was, for 95% of the moviegoing audience, simply that the film made 200 million overseas last week. That was it. Movie reviews don't really factor in at all as any sort of impetus unless they're uniformly excellent or terrible. Avengers reviews have all been pretty good.
The idea that the marketing couldn't work because they didn't have any quality in the film to pull from doesn't make any sense either considering how many disappointing movies had AMAZING marketing built around their visuals.
This movie's being "disappointing" at the box-office has everything to do with the marketing and the buzz that was built, and for whatever reason, it appears they didn't do AS good a job this time out as they did on the last film to get people excited to see these characters come together again. I get where you're going, but we're talking about day one domestic box-office. There is almost zero opportunity for word-of-mouth to have factored in that fast.
I think pestul is right that the ads have been very lacking in the attention-grabbing department. They seemed to gravitate towards being little more than announcing, "hey, it's the Avengers, and here's more of them!", without doing much to sell it. There's just nothing really exciting about how they did the ads.
I agree with that - if anything, the most effective of the Avengers ads was the first - the one that seemed a little more serious, that presented Ultron as a big ol' "FUCK YOU" threat, with that creepy music and such.
