A franchise ending is supposed to stay finished. People leave the theater, argue about the last shot, and the story sits there. 7 years after Avengers: Endgame, Marvel has put the same film back in cinemas under the name Avengers Endgame: Encore, not because the 2019 cut was incomplete, but because the next Avengers film needs an audience that has just watched that ending again.
The original, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo and released in 2019, closed the Infinity Saga. The surviving Avengers undo Thanos's snap, Tony Stark dies using the stones, and Steve Rogers returns the stones before staying in the past with Peggy Carter.
The last image is their dance.
There is no post-credit scene.
After the credits, only a hammering sound plays, which Joe Russo described at the time as a bookend to Tony building the first Iron Man suit. The film opened to $357 million domestically and finished at about $2.799 billion worldwide, second on the all-time chart.
But what followed never quite replaced that shared appointment.
Individual films kept arriving, some of them large, but the phase after Endgame did not produce another movie that the whole audience treated as the ending of a story they had all been watching together.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day later passed Endgame's domestic opening, with a reported $360 million, which says the audience is still there. It does not say the studio has had another ending on that scale.
Avengers: Doomsday, due December 18, is the film being sold as that return: Avengers, X-Men, and the Fantastic Four in one picture, aimed at a threat that sits outside any single team's movie.
The threat is now far beyond Thanos.
Where Thanos had the power to wipe the universe, this adversary in Doomsday is a major threat to all universes.
And Encore is the bridge Marvel built out of the old film rather than a new one.
The British Board of Film Classification lists a standard version at 183 minutes and 3 seconds and a longer cut at 186 minutes and 14 seconds, against the original's 181 minutes.
Reports put the new material at roughly four scenes and somewhere between about four and five minutes, all of it at the end.
The body of the movie is the 2019 cut. A short introduction from Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. plays in some formats, fuller on Infinity Vision screens, shorter on IMAX and Dolby, absent on a standard ticket.
The first addition is cut into the final scene.
Steve and Peggy are still dancing when someone knocks. Peggy opens the door to Loki in Time Variance Authority (TVA) clothes. She asks if she can help him. He says he can help her, then makes clear he means both of them, and that he knows Steve is nearby. Steve steps out. The film cuts to credits.
In the credits, Bruce Banner records a diary from an underground military bunker after his first Hulk incident in more than a decade, working on a gamma-suppression serum. The lights fail. Downey's Doctor Doom says he is there to collect him. The picture returns to an empty room and a glowing green mark.
While the main narrative centers entirely around the primary MCU reality, Earth-616 (the "Sacred Timeline"), a later scene is at the TVA, with Mobius, O.B., and Casey watching two universes about to collide, tagged Earth-10005, the Fox X-Men world, and Earth-1127. The count climbs into the thousands. O.B. says the multiverse is collapsing.
The old hammering sound now has pictures: Doom forging his mask. Joe Russo has called the re-release required viewing for following Doomsday, and a natural progression from one film into the other. Anthony Russo said that anyone who saw Endgame in 2019 could not have seen this coming.
The man in that mask is the reason the marketing has been this loud.
Downey played Tony Stark from the first Iron Man through Endgame, and Marvel cast him as Victor von Doom for Doomsday and the film after it. The studio has not said the two characters are the same person.
The resemblance is the point of the casting: the actor who closed the last saga is the face of the threat opening the next one.
In the comics, Doom is the ruler of Latveria, a scientist just behind Reed Richards and a sorcerer trained on his mother's books after she lost her soul to Mephisto.
A machine he built to reach her exploded and scarred him. Monks in Tibet forged the armor and the mask, and he put the mask on while it was still hot. The armor supplies the strength, the blasts, and the fields. The spells are separate.
Later, in Secret Wars, he takes the power of the Beyonders and briefly runs reality. Marvel's own description of the film version calls him a master of cutting-edge science and powerful magic.
The Doomsday trailer, released July 20, is where that claim gets a picture.
Thor swings Stormbreaker. Doom stops the axe with two fingers, flings it aside, and throws Thor with a burst of magic. He then raises a host of Sentinels and says that hell answers to him, because he is Doom. Sue Storm narrates a version of him who once had a kindness the present man does not. Reed asks what Victor has done.
The trailer drew 503 million views in 24 hours, Disney's biggest trailer launch and the second-biggest movie trailer debut on record, behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day at 719 million.
Select tickets went on sale with it and took $16.5 million on the first day, with premium shows on December 17 and 18 largely gone.
The re-release opened September 25 and made an estimated $86 million worldwide over the weekend, $26 million in North America and $60 million internationally, the number one film globally. China led the international split at about $13.5 million, then the UK and Ireland at $5.4 million.
IMAX alone accounted for about $13.7 million, 16% of the opening. Disney put Endgame's lifetime total at $2.885 billion, about $39 million behind Avatar. Screen Daily called it the second-biggest opening for an archive title, behind the 2012 Titanic 3D re-release.
Whether four minutes justify a three-hour ticket is the argument that followed. A reviewer called Endgame a film that did not need the extension, and described the new scenes as scattershot extras jammed onto an ending that had been left alone until the last moment. On Reddit, a widely shared reply to the Russos' "required viewing" line said the footage would be in a YouTube short within two days. People leaving theaters split the same way. Some called the night a blast and said the Loki interruption, the Hulk collection, and the TVA scene made the jump to December feel real.
Others said the additions were a tease of the usual post-credit kind, worth it for another look at Endgame and not for the new minutes.
The gross says a lot of people bought the ticket anyway. It does not say they needed the extra scenes to do it.
