Avengers: Endgame: Encore is not a director's cut. It is a $126m-grossing trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, dressed in the clothing of a beloved film you already paid to see. That this strategy worked — that audiences turned up again, that the re-release pushed the film's lifetime gross to approximately $2.925bn, a whisker past Avatar's $2.923bn — tells you something true about how Marvel understands its audience: not as viewers but as detectives. The four added scenes are brief, blunt, and structurally purposeful in a way that most of the MCU's post-credits sequences have not been for years. The first reworks Endgame's closing shot of Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter, interrupted mid-dance by Loki, whose presence implies that whatever multiverse catastrophe is coming is serious enough to pull a man out of a retirement he earned by saving half of all life. The second plants Bruce Banner underground, struggling to contain the Hulk, while Robert Downey Jr.'s voice — now belonging to Doctor Doom rather than Tony Stark — announces he has come to 'collect.' The implications are unsettling in exactly the way Marvel intends. The third scene is the most densely plotted: TVA operatives Mobius, OB, and Casey watch in horror as universes collapse, including the 20th Century Fox X-Men reality. This maps directly onto Jonathan Hickman's Avengers and New Avengers comics run, where incursions between universes culminate in the Time Runs Out storyline and feed into the 2015 Secret Wars event. In that story, Doctor Doom assembles the wreckage of destroyed realities into a patchwork planet called Battleworld and rules it. Marvel is essentially putting the plot of Secret Wars on a billboard. The fourth and final scene is the most emotionally sophisticated. It pairs the original audio of Tony Stark hammering his first Iron Man suit in an Afghan cave with new imagery, ending on Doom's mask. The question it poses — whether Doom is a Stark variant, or whether Marvel is simply exploiting our emotional memory of that sound attached to the wrong metal face — is left deliberately open. It is, admittedly, more interesting than the studio's recent habit of promising complexity and delivering spectacle. The honest read on what Marvel has done here is this: they have taken a film the audience already loved, inserted four load-bearing story connectors, and charged cinema prices for the privilege of receiving plot information. The Disney accountant joke in the original Guardian piece lands because it's accurate — the studio that owns both the highest and second-highest grossing films of all time is the only winner in the box office horse race. But the scenes themselves suggest that whoever is steering Doomsday has actually read the comics they're adapting, which is more than could be said for the Multiverse Saga's earlier chapters. Whether that's enough to rebuild trust after Quantumania and Secret Invasion is the more interesting question, and these four scenes cannot answer it.
