Avengers: Endgame is officially the highest-grossing movie of all-time again after its Encore re-release, meant to bridge the gap between the 2019 crossover film and the MCU’s next big crossover, Avengers: Doomsday, helped it pass Avatar. I don’t begrudge anyone going to see Encore in order to get another big-screen experience of a movie that, upon its original release, really felt like a cultural moment of the kind that Marvel has failed to create again in the years since. What bothers me is that the new scenes Marvel added to the film as part of the re-release to try to salvage a strung-together stumble into its next big event are almost patronizing, amounting to nothing more than a bald-faced ass pull. Encore is Marvel asking fans to pay to watch the company try to pretend it’s a narrative mastermind that’s been planning this all along, when it’s actually rewriting history in ways it never planned to in 2019.
Encore, much like the entire output of the Marvel Cinematic Universe over the last few years, is essentially a patch job. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige would like you to believe that the last time the company led up to a big crossover event, specifically Thanos wiping out half the universe in a deluded fit of grandeur, there wasn’t that much buildup to Thanos wiping out half the universe in a deluded fit of grandeur. But it was certainly more than we’ve gotten leading up to Doomsday and its introduction of Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, who has appeared in exactly one post-credits scene over the past 18 years of Marvel movies. The new footage in Encore is basically a collection of post-credits scenes that Marvel wishes it had put in projects between Endgame and the present day, ones that pretend the entire plan for the franchise wasn’t blown up when Kang actor Jonathan Majors was embroiled in a domestic violence case in 2023, leading to him and his character being excised from the MCU as years of setting him up as the big bad went out the window.
Marvel has been in crisis mode for years trying to salvage a hard situation, and while I”m sympathetic to that, I also think Marvel’s insistence that this was all part of a grand plan, to the point where the company is even willing to deride its own previous work in order to maintain the narrative, is a sign that it’s terrified of looking like it’s on its back foot.
“I do think—I was just saying to somebody else—that the Thanos buildup has built up in people’s heads over the years,” Feige said in a July interview. “He sat on a chair at the end. He pulled a gauntlet out and said, ‘I’ll do it myself.’ And he yelled at Ronin on a video screen briefly and that was kind of it.”
Feige would have you believe screentime is the extent of buildup, when Thanos’ plan was always an ongoing threat long before Infinity War premiered in 2018. Doomsday, meanwhile, needed a re-release of an old movie with new footage to justify its decision to retreat into safety by bringing back Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. for an expensive nostalgia trip, and to establish the presence of Doctor Doom at all.
Encore has four new scenes. One shows Loki, seemingly the variant that stars in the Loki Disney+ series, visiting Evans’ Steve Rogers after the events of Endgame proper, leading to a new wave of fan speculation that Steve’s decision to go back in time and live a happy life with Peggy Carter may have been retconned into some kind of multiverse-shattering event. Another scene, seemingly IMAX-exclusive because Marvel’s depravity knows no limits, shows the Time Variance Authority noting multiple incursions as different universes collide into one another, including that of the Fox X-Men movies. There’s also a scene that I’m surprised they didn’t just tack on to the end of Spider-Man: Brand New Day instead, showing Bruce Banner, shortly after the events of that film, being abducted by Doom for unknown reasons. But again, Encore is trying and failing to obfuscate that the plan has changed.
Perhaps the most laughable of these new scenes is one that is less an extension of something we saw in Endgame, than of something we heard. In the original Endgame, we hear audio of Tony Stark forging his original Iron Man mask in the 2008 film, where it plays as a poignant tribute to the hero who both started the MCU in 2008 and sacrificed himself to save the world at the end of Endgame. In Encore, it’s “revealed” that the hammering sound we heard at the end of the movie is actually Doctor Doom creating his own iconic mask.
Obviously this wasn’t the case in 2019, but as Marvel seeks to make connections that were never there, changing this moment that was an homage to its past into a link to its cobbled-together future is perhaps the most obvious example of why this entire endeavor is a pathetic nostalgia play. Marvel, rather than trying to salvage its original plan with Kang by recasting Majors, has spent three years trying to pull the wool over the eyes of anyone who might not be privy to its various behind-the-scenes struggles and pretend that this was all part of the plan. If traveling to new horizons doesn’t work out, you can always go back home and stick to what feels comfortable and safe in an agoraphobic panic.
Encore did its job in rewriting history, and has now given Marvel back the title of highest-grossing film of all time. The re-release is, by Marvel’s metrics, a success, I’m sure. Doomsday is poised to be a massive hit as it brings characters from over 25 years of superhero movies onto the screen at once. I just wish it didn’t feel like Marvel was pissing on my leg and telling me it’s raining.
