Culture 4 min read By Morgan Griffin
Avengers: Endgame Encore Adds Four Minutes of Doomsday Setup
Marvel has re-released Avengers: Endgame in an Encore edition with roughly four minutes of new footage that bridges the 2019 film to Avengers: Doomsday, including a Loki encounter with Peggy Carter, Doctor Doom confronting Bruce Banner, and a TVA warning that the multiverse is collapsing.
Marvel has returned Avengers: Endgame to cinemas in a new Encore edition that adds roughly four minutes of previously unseen material designed to bridge the 2019 blockbuster to the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. The presentation opened in theaters on September 25 and includes footage filmed during production on Doomsday, which will bring Robert Downey Jr. back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Victor von Doom rather than Tony Stark.
The most striking addition arrives before the original film has even finished. Endgame originally concluded with a young Steve Rogers finally sharing his long-promised dance with Peggy Carter after choosing to remain in the past. In the Encore version, that sequence continues when a knock interrupts the dance. Peggy answers the door and finds Loki dressed in his Time Variance Authority attire. When she asks whether she can help him, Loki tells her he can instead help her, then makes clear that he knows Steve is hiding nearby and means both of them. The scene directly ties the ending of Endgame to Loki's role as guardian of the branching multiverse and gives new context to Chris Evans' confirmed return as Steve Rogers in Doomsday.
A second substantial addition catches up with Bruce Banner after the events leading into Doomsday. Banner is shown recording a video diary from a military facility deep underground, where he has voluntarily isolated himself after suffering his first Hulk incident in more than a decade. He explains that he has been developing a gamma-suppression serum intended to prevent the Hulk from breaking free. His recording is interrupted when the lights begin to glitch and an eerie green glow appears. Banner asks who has entered the supposedly secure facility before the voice of Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom answers, telling him, «I'm here to collect you.» The picture then cuts out as the Hulk can be heard roaring. When the camera returns, both Banner and Doom are gone, leaving behind glowing green markings on the floor. Exactly why Doom wants the Hulk, and whether Banner is being recruited, imprisoned or used for some other purpose, is left unanswered.
The Encore edition also gives new meaning to one of Endgame's most famous audio cues. The 2019 film ended its credits with the sound of metal being hammered, a deliberate echo of Tony Stark constructing his first Iron Man suit in 2008. This time, the hammering accompanies footage of Doctor Doom forging his mask, creating an explicit visual link between Downey Jr.'s former Marvel character and the entirely separate villain he now plays.
Elsewhere, the TVA's Mobius, O.B. and Casey discover an incursion developing between two realities identified as Earth-10005 and Earth-1127. Earth-10005 is the designation previously associated with the Fox X-Men movie universe, one of the realities already confirmed to play a major part in Doomsday. What initially appears to be an isolated crisis quickly escalates as more universes begin suffering incursions, with the number rising into the thousands as the TVA realizes the structure of the multiverse itself is failing. O.B. sums up the scale of the problem: «The multiverse is collapsing.»
Together, the additions turn Endgame's previously definitive ending into a bridge to the next Avengers film. Steve and Peggy are now connected to Loki, Hulk has been taken by Doom, and the TVA is watching entire realities move toward destruction. Marvel had promised an «exclusive look» at the forthcoming film, with an additional sneak peek available at IMAX and Infinity Vision-certified screenings.
Avengers: Doomsday will arrive in UK cinemas on December 16, two days before its December 18 release in the US.
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