Avengers Endgame: Encore has four new scenes that link to Doomsday

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new Avengers movie out in December, the first since 2019, and it is a Very Big Deal.

OK, not for all, but definitely for some given pre-orders for Avengers: Doomsday tickets opened yesterday and, according to a super excited press release from Disney, has passed $1 million in Australian sales in that 24-hour period.

To further hype up the upcoming epic, the folks over at Marvel have re-released Avengers: Endgame into cinemas, the previous instalment which made $US2.7 billion and was, for a time, the highest grossing movie in history (not accounting for inflation).

But that movie is already on Disney+, so what will actually entice anyone but the most diehard-hardcore Marvel fans into spending three hours and a chunk of change? By renaming it Avengers Endgame: Encore (note the placement of the colon has now shifted).

In French, in its simplest form the word “encore” translates to “again”.

Again, though, is not enough. Or it shouldn’t be. So, Marvel has added four new scenes into the re-released film. These are not deleted scenes or what used to be DVD extras. Nor is it a directors’ cut.

These are four new scenes that are directly linked to – and therefore tease – Avengers: Doomsday, and were shot during the production of the upcoming movie.

Doomsday sees the return of many Marvel veterans, including Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans, both of whom had exited the franchise in 2019 after Endgame.

Downey Jr was convinced to return with a different role (and, presumably, buckets and buckets of money), this time playing an iconic Marvel villain, Doctor Doom. It’s not yet clear if there is a multiversal connection between his original character, Iron Man/Tony Stark, who was killed in Endgame and this version of Doom.

The plot seems to largely centre on Avengers superheroes taking on Doom and the existential threat he poses to many worlds.

Evans will reprise his character of Steve Rogers/Captain America, who, in Endgame, had chosen to live out his life in an alternate timeline so he could be with Peggy Carter.

The confirmed cast list for Doomsday is gargantuan, comprising many of the franchise’s long-time stars as well as more recent additions. Among them are Pedro Pascal, Paul Rudd, Florence Pugh, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Simu Liu, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Vanessa Kirby, Hayley Atwell, Winston Duke and Anthony Mackie.

Also joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time are the original X-Men stars from the 2000s movies, whose narrative continuity has now been folded in: Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Alan Cumming, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn and Kelsey Grammer.

Doomsday also marks the return of directors Joe and Anthony Russo and writers Stephen McFeely and Chris McKenna, who have not worked with Marvel since Endgame.

Avengers: Doomsday will be a real test for Marvel, which has faced a few tumultuous years since Covid disrupted the movie business.

Many of its latter-day releases have underperformed or outright bombed, as it became creatively overwhelmed by a corporate mandate under a former regime to produce more, more and more, especially for the then fledgling streaming platform.

That glut fed into the perception that Marvel movies and TV shows were more homework than entertainment. The brand has since worked to dispel the idea that to watch a new Marvel project meant you had to have seen everything that came before it.

It’ll be interesting to see how that will play out with Doomsday, which very much will require a level of presumed knowledge of Marvel lore for it to make sense. But the “event” nature of the movie is also one of its core selling points. There’s a conflict there.

With that in mind, for those who are only casual fans, and don’t want to have to go to the cinema for Avengers Endgame: Encore, but still want to know what those four extra scenes are before Doomsday, here it is, according to Variety.

SPOILER ALERT

SCENE ONE

This is an interlude with Steve and Peggy in the alternate timeline (or multiverse). They’re living their life when Loki shows up knocking at their door.

Loki, if you watched the two seasons of his spin-off TV show, is now at the Time Variance Authority, a multiversal organisation which is meant to keep the chaos of all those parallel words and branches from destroying all of time and place.

Loki, as we left him, had sacrificed himself to essentially be the keeper of multiverse order, a position he can’t move from, so this scene must take place before that happened. He tells Steve and Peggy that Steve’s time travel back, which created this branch, has become unstable.

SCENE TWO

Loki is also the focus of this scene, which takes place within the Time Variance Authority, and also stars Mobius (Owen Wilson), Ourosboros (Ke Huy Quan), Casey (Eugene Cordero) and Miss Minutes (Tara Strong).

They’re in the office and become panicked when they discover that there are two Earths that are about to collide into each other. And they’re not the only ones, it seems many parallel worlds are starting to smash and destruct into one another.

The multiverse is in peril.

As a non-narrative aside, maybe that’s not a bad thing. Let’s prune all those branches, the wider fandom never warmed to the whole multiverse thing (yeah, there’s that involuntary eyeroll at every mention of the word), even if that means we’ll never get that Charlize Theron movie with the dimension-hopping Clea and future Mrs Strange.

SCENE THREE

This one takes place during the end credits and stars Mark Ruffalo (we love Mark Ruffalo, bless his heart) as Bruce Banner where he’s in an underground bunker working on a serum to, presumably, stop himself from Hulking out, again.

Doom breaks into the room and Banner becomes the green guy, and then, cut to black.

The background to this relates to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which saw Ruffalo’s Banner lose control over his Hulk side after he had the mind-whammy put on him by Jean Grey (Sadie Sink), and once he got his arse kicked by Peter Parker, he was thrown into a secure facility, which is where Doom finds him.

SCENE FOUR

At the end of the original Avengers: Endgame, after the very last credit has rolled, you hear this metallic clanging sound. Attentive Marvel obsessives identified that effect has been from the 2008 Iron Man movie, from a scene in which Tony Stark is making his armour.

In 2019, that sound effect served two purposes – one was to honour the character, who had just sacrificed himself to save the world, and the other was to tease who might replace Stark as an Iron Man-esque hero. At the time, an Ironheart/Riri Williams project was already being mooted.

Now, in Encore, that sound is accompanied by images of Doom forging his iconic mask, which hints at parallels between Doom and Stark. Maybe.