We’ve known since last year that Avengers: Endgame was getting a second re-release to help build up hype for this December’s Avengers: Doomsday. For months, Disney’s been hyping up this “Encore edition” as a tie-in to the new superhero film, complete with new footage set “in the Doomsday story.” Now we may know the value of that extra material, and the big takeaway might be… that’s it?
A recent AMC Theaters listing revealed Encore will run three hours and five minutes long. Not only does this make for the longest MCU movie yet, it also beats the original version by four minutes, suggesting that’s all fans are getting. Not that anyone’s going into this expecting a whole array of new scenes, but for the hype that Encore’s been getting, it makes you wonder if Avengers: Endgame has any real business coming back to theaters.
Obviously, Marvel wants to use the re-release to make Doomsday feel more special, but the way it’s going about this is a bit messy. It makes sense to want MCU fans to remember where they last saw Steve, but it becomes a bit trickier with the other returning heavy hitters. If Robert Downey Jr. is indeed just playing Victor Von Doom with no multiversal identity theft going on, leaning so hard on Endgame nostalgia (and by extension, previous Avengers movies) feels like wrongheaded theory-feeding for the sake of it. Similarly, it’s strange to encourage audiences to watch Avengers: Endgame and Loki before Doomsday, but not Thor: Love and Thunder. Not a great movie, but it speaks to Thor’s headspace going into Doomsday in a way that Endgame can’t, something his own teaser even acknowledged.
The best thing working in Avengers: Endgame—Encore‘s case isn’t its Doomsday connections, but its sense of nostalgic community. Scenes like Captain America using Mjolnir against Thanos and the Portals—close your eyes and you can already imagine how deafening the applause might be when Chadwick Boseman struts into the scene, given it’s his last movie in this franchise—helped make Endgame such a rewatchable beast that it was back in 2019. Is that enough to build Doomsday hype instead of disappointment that the Multiverse Saga hasn’t reached similar highs? We’ll find out on September 25.
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