Was the Avengers: Endgame Encore Extra Footage Worth It?
Avengers: Endgame's re-release boasted extra footage that set up this year's Doomsday, enticing Marvel fans and their wallets but leaving some uncertain about its intentions and impact.
This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame Encore
A couple of days before Avengers: Endgame Encore’s release, Marvel Comics editor Tom Brennan fired off a post on X that some described as a perfect response to the negativity over extra footage from the film leaking online.
Endgame, which once wrapped up the Infinity Saga in a fairly neat bow and closed out Steve Rogers’ story, now just sets up another chapter of it in Avengers: Doomsday. While some loved the new ending, others were disheartened that Marvel changed a beloved MCU movie that set a high watermark for the franchise. “If you’re bothered by Avengers Endgame: Encore taking a perfect ending to a story and immediately undermining it to set up the next one, have I got 87 years worth of Marvel Comics to show you,” Brennan wrote in his (totally valid) point.
In the new, altered conclusion of Endgame, Steve’s long-awaited dance with Peggy Carter is now interrupted by TVA variant Loki, who knocks at the door and offers to help them. Traveling back through time to be with Peggy seems to have created some multiversal consequences, though we don’t get to find out exactly what they are before the credits roll.
Indeed, it’s been clear for a while that Marvel planned to build a bridge to Doomsday with this re-release of the film, and that Chris Evans would return to the franchise as Rogers, alongside Robert Downey Jr. as the villainous Doctor Doom. For anyone who hoped the new footage would be confined to post-credits scenes so Endgame as they knew it would remain intact, those hopes were gone. Doom is coming, whether they like it or not.
We know it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Marvel once planned a Multiverse Saga centered on Kang, played by Jonathan Majors, but between the villain’s appearances in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Loki season 2, it became impossible to continue with those plans. Majors had been arrested after a dispute with his then-girlfriend, and a jury had found him guilty of two misdemeanor counts relating to reckless assault and harassment. Marvel dropped him, Kang was forgotten, and the studio went back to the drawing board. Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo soon returned to the fold, and so did Evans and Downey Jr. Changes have been implemented so that Steve Rogers’ ending was just the start of a new set of problems that led to Doom, and fans will have to accept that those problems now start in the final moments of Endgame.
However, not everyone had access to all the extra bonus footage featured in the new version of Endgame. Only IMAX and Infinity Vision screenings included all four additional moments; regular screenings showed only three: the aforementioned Steve, Peggy, and Loki scene, one in which Doom collects Bruce Banner from an underground bunker (which seemed like it would have been a better fit for the post-credits of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where we last saw Banner being taken away from the carnage he caused thanks to Jean Grey’s possession), and a few seconds of Doom forging his mask to the same sounds as Tony Stark creating his original Iron Man mask.
One punter over on Reddit described having a “good experience” with Endgame Encore itself, but added that “the biggest reason to watch the film was 4min doomsday footage,” and ended their post by saying they felt “scammed” after seeing only some of the extra scenes. In fact, the IMAX and Infinity Vision screenings had always boasted an additional Doomsday preview. It turned out to be set in the TVA, where Mobius (Owen Wilson) and O.B. (Ke Huy Quan) react to the multiverse collapsing, but clearly not everyone knew this would be exclusive to IMAX and Infinity Vision.
Of course, for extremely online fans who didn’t mind spoilers, all the Endgame Encore scenes were old news by the time the film was officially released. Audience members recorded the scenes during early screenings and quickly shared them on social media, which probably wasn’t much of a surprise to Marvel. “We design these films to unfold in a certain way, and we want audiences to feel those moments as intended,” Joe Russo recently mused when asked about spoilers. “But at the same time, you can’t control everything. You have to focus on making something that holds up beyond the initial surprise.”
If Marvel and Disney’s goal was to hype up Doomsday and make money, they arguably succeeded. Encore made $86 million globally over the weekend. Yet some who didn’t get to see all the new footage on the big screen left disappointed, and others will wonder whether adding new scenes to a now-classic movie was worth it when Doomsday is just a few months away. Meanwhile, for anyone who skipped Loki, confusion must reign supreme.
Dropping big plans and retooling the future of a cinematic universe will inevitably come with setbacks. So far, there don’t seem to have been many to trouble Marvel on the run-up to Doomsday, with Disney describing the excitement surrounding Encore’s release as “a powerful testament to Disney’s unrivaled ability to create epic, enduring stories that fans want to return to again and again.”
Only time will tell whether this new direction will keep paying off and whether fans will stick with an MCU that can’t quite let go of its past glories, even if it has to change them to remind people of the things they once loved about it.