Hype is a thing. And hype might be THE thing in the movie business.

Beware – some spoilers ahead.

I won’t tell you that if you didn’t see THUNDERBOLTS* during its opening weekend that social media is determined to spoil it for you, but Marvel and many other social media accounts are hyping the holy hell out of one of the final big twists for the film.

SPOILERS HERE:

In the final scene of THUNDERBOLTS*, the reveal of what that asterisk was all about comes as they’re announced as the New Avengers. This puts them into conflict with the Avengers team that Sam Wilson, the new Captain America, is going to put together at then-president Thunderbolt Ross’ request. There’s even a reference to Sam threatening to sue the scrappy team of anti-heroes who never really accepted the name Thunderbolts.

If you know some Marvel history, you know that in the late 1990s, the comic book company decided to spin off the Avengers and the Fantastic Four into their own universe.

To fill the void – no pun intended, if you’ve seen THUNDERBOLTS* – in the Marvel comic book universe we know, where Spider-Man and the X-Men were still operating, a new Avengers team was put together in a comic book titled “Thunderbolts.”

The secret, revealed at the end of that first comic, was that the new Avengers were not heroes at all, but were actually the supervillain team the Masters of Evil.

They were villains who pretended to be heroes, although eventually many of them warmed to the idea of doing actual heroic deeds and grew into heroic roles.

The movie THUNDERBOLTS* put a nice spin on this, with shady anti-heroes coming together to save the world. And at the end, in a manipulative political move, they are dubbed the New Avengers.

The funnier or, alternately, more frustrating element of all this as related to the movie THUNDERBOLTS* is that beginning Monday morning (this morning as I write), Marvel has saturated social media sites with the film’s supposed “new title” THE NEW AVENGERS and posted video of the cast revealing the name and even Winter Soldier actor Sebastian Stan “covering” a THUNDERBOLTS* bus stop poster with one featuring the new title.

It’s a great publicity stunt that pays off months of speculation about what the asterisk at the end of the THUNDERBOLTS* title meant.

It you didn’t get caught and spoiled, you might agree.*

*Or not.