With Avengers: Doomsday roughly a month away, Disney just delivered some good news for MCU fans who want to be fully caught up before Doctor Doom blows through the Marvel pantheon. Avengers Endgame: Encore is coming to Disney Plus very soon.
For those not in the know, Encore is a recut version of Endgame that adds scenes tying into Doomsday. The film was released in theaters on Sept. 25, grossing $142.9 million and making Avengers: Endgame the highest-grossing film of all time at $2.942 billion. Avatar and Endgame have been trading the box office crown for some time now: Endgame’s original 2019 release made it the highest-grossing film over Avatar, before a 2021 Avatar re-release let Cameron’s sci-fi epic temporarily retake the No. 1 spot. Marvel fans who missed Encore in theaters can see the film on Disney Plus on Nov. 13.
What’s different in Avengers Endgame: Encore?
As for what’s changed in Encore, the film has four extra scenes that add four minutes to theruntime. For those who don’t mind spoilers, here’s an outline of what’s different. Encore adds an extended ending, two scenes that play mid-credits, and another sequence at the end of the credits.
In the extended ending, Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter are visited by a version of Loki who promises to help them — this is likely why Captain America will appear in Doomsday, despite seemingly livinga happy life with Peggy in the past. As for the mid-credits scenes, one shows Bruce Banner self-isolating in a military complex due to an “incident” (presumably referring to the events of Spider-Man: Brand New Day). As Banner experiments with a way to suppress the gamma radiation in his body, Doctor Doom teleports him out of his cell.
In the second mid-credits scene, a bunch of vaguely confusing multiverse stuff happens that’s built on the TV series Loki. Specifically, Time Variance Authority employees Ouroboros, Casey, and Mobius M. Mobius see that the alternate universes Earth-10005 and Earth-1127 are about to collide. More overlaps are detected, revealing that the multiverse is collapsing. In the final post-credits scene, the sound of metal being hammered during the credits is revealed to be Doctor Doom forging his mask.
These scenes were added to segue more smoothly into Avengers: Doomsday, which didn’t have the same degree of buildup as previous Avengers films. While several films leading up to Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame hyped Thanos as an antagonist and teased the Infinity Stones, Doomsday came together far more hastily.
In 2022, Disney announced that the next Avengers movie would be subtitled The Kang Dynasty. However, this concept was scrapped after Jonathan Majors, who played Kang, was found guilty of assault and harassment charges. Marvel fully pivoted in 2024, revealing that the next Avengers film would instead be centered around Doctor Doom.
Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on Dec. 18.