Who needs Infinity War’s 650 characters, when you have Deadpool 2’s Peter?

This week, anticipation of a new Avengers movie took over the internet hive mind once again. Across the web, diehard fans were asking themselves the same questions. What is an infinity war, exactly? Which of the film's 650 main characters will die? Will its post-credits scenes finally achieve the dream of being longer than the film itself?

Despite this fervour, a pair of smaller-scale superhero stories proved to be better vehicles for the internet’s attention this week.

First up was Venom, a Marvel property currently owned by Sony, as part of their complex and mostly ruinous ownership of the rights to certain Spiderman properties. The movie features Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, (by law, the title characters of all Spiderman franchises must now be portrayed by British men named Tom H), a journalist who becomes infected with the titular, razor-toothed, power-bestowing alien, or "symbiote".

It was the first trailer for the film to feature a close look at Venom in his full, gruesome glory. And, while some fixated on the lascivious demeanour of the character’s two-foot long tongue, others made a slightly more specific complaint.

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“I feel like tom hardy only signed onto Venom because he knew he would get to cover his face for half the movie” quipped @Skylux_aish, one of several hundred commenters who wondered the same thing about the permanently visage-obscuring thesp.

Janky visuals

In fact, most commenters mocked the film’s janky visuals or Hardy’s bewildering Brooklyn-ese dialect choice, but it proved nevertheless buzzily viral, with Webster’s dictionary even confirming that its popularity had led to a 35,700 per cent uptick in searches for the word “symbiote” on Google that evening.

Elsewhere, even fully Marvel-owned superhero films have to deploy ingenious ends to coexist within the Avengersphere, and Deadpool 2's trailer did just that by introducing the world to the latest member of Deadpool's X-Force crew.

Peter, played by Catastrophe’s Rob Delaney, is only shown in the last few seconds of the trailer but quickly became its standout meme. He doesn’t have metal legs or lasers for eyes, wasn’t bitten by a radioactive shih-tzu or grown from a vat of molars by a cabal of evil dentists. He’s a family man who likes cats and bee-keeping and, in a delightfully effortful long-con, has been running his own hilariously bland Twitter feed for weeks.

Whether dropping gems like "Great tips. This is a total #mindblow" when retweeting abdominal exercises, or quoting particularly moving Celine Dion lyrics, Peter's tweets are a pitch-perfect reflection of the mild and mundane, showing a truly savvy bit of pop cinematic world building. Who needs Infinity War's 650 characters, when Peter can do so much with 280?