Josh Checks out the Extra Scenes in Avengers Endgame: Encore!

I love revival screenings and the opportunity to see classic older movies back on the big screen.  That said, I wasn’t originally planning to go see Avengers Endgame: Encore, Marvel’s re-release of Endgame as part of the lead-up to Doomsday.  While I had a blast seeing Endgame originally in a theater, the movie has fallen somewhat in my estimation in the years since.  (Mostly because of some of the plot problems I mentioned in my original review.)  I’d have been more excited had they released Infinity War to theaters, which I think for me still stands as the high-point in the entire MCU.  But my daughters really wanted to see Endgame on the big screen, and I haven’t rewatched Endgame for years, and I was intrigued by the announcement of some extra footage added to the end.  So I decided to go.

First and most importantly: only a few hours before we were supposed to see Encore, I read online that general screenings only had SOME of the extra footage; to see EVERYTHING new, you had to go to an Infinity Vision screening.  There are conflicting reports about this online, but if that is true, it is hugely annoying.  I would have been extremely pissed to have sat through this three-hour movie and then only gotten SOME of the extra footage.  Thankfully, we were able to switch our tickets to an Infinity Vision showing at a different theater (which actually wound up saving us money, so all’s well that ends well).  But if this is indeed true, Marvel should have been shouting this from the rooftops during their promotion for Encore, rather than keeping this a surprise/secret.  I think it’s extremely lame (and actually deceitful) that people could buy tickets to Encore but not get the full experience.

I had fun watching Encore!  I was pleasantly surprised how well Endgame holds up, and how much fun it was to see this spectacle back on a huge movie screen.  The beats all still work!  The film is fun and exciting and emotional.  (The final scenes with both Tony and Cap both got to me, just as they did when I first saw the film!)  Yes, I am still bothered by some of the plot problems.  (If the heroes could time-travel to ANY time or place, why didn’t they pick far easier times in the further past to collect all the stones?  If the whole team had so much trouble getting the stones, how could Cap on his own put them all back without anyone else being the wiser?  In an MCU in which the multiverse exists, how could stealing the stones in the first place not create alternate timelines, even if the stones are later returned?  And wouldn’t those timelines and their billions of inhabitants all be doomed based on the Ancient One’s warnings?  And the ending is way too simplistic, dodging all the tough questions about the catastrophic challenges of half of the world’s population reappearing in a world that had been without them for five years, or exploring whether Cap kept secret from Peggy everything he knew about history, from Hydra to 9/11.  I could go on.)  But when watching the movie, the confidence of the storytelling and the depth of these characters sucked me fully back into the story, and I had a blast going on this ride again.

The additional scenes are just what I’d expected/hopes.  They’re far from essential viewing, but they’re all fun.

Want to know more about the extra stuff?  Then read on — FULL SPOILERS AHEAD!!

SPOILERS!!!!

The first scene is an extension to the original concluding scene of Steve and Peggy dancing together in the past.  In Encore, their dance is interrupted by a knock at the door — it’s Loki!  This was a fun surprise, as the old footage slid smoothly into the new footage.  I’d been hoping that the heroic Loki from the Loki TV show would be involved in the multiversal story of Doomsday, so it was a pleasure to see that seemingly confirmed right away here.  (My only quibble with this change is that I hope that Steve and Peggy’s happy ending from Endgame isn’t completely erased by the events of Doomsday.  I’d figured that at some point Steve would get pulled from his life with Peggy to rejoin the fight, but I don’t love the implication that this happened so immediately after he and Peggy were reunited.  They didn’t even get to finish their first dance??  I guess we don’t know how long Steve and Peggy had been back together before that dance scene, but I’d always assumed we were catching up to them very soon after their reunion.  We’ll see how this plays out in Doomsday.)

Next we get a scene with Bruce Banner, set soon after the events of Spider-Man: Brand New Day.  One of my few small complaints about Brand New Day was how they left Banner’s story dangling, with Banner’s apparently getting shipped off to a mental institution at the end.  I’d really wanted one more scene to resolve what happened to him after his Hulk-out.  So I was thrilled to get that here!  (I wonder if this scene was originally intended to be a post-credits scene for Brand New Day??  I wish they’d done that!  It’d have woirked so well as that missing resolution for Bruce, and a great tease for Doomsday, which I was surprised was absent from the end of Brand New Day.)  Anyways, it’s good to see Bruce isn’t still locked up in an institution, though he seems like he’s in rough shape.  We then see him “collected” by an off-camera presence, presumably Doom.  (I believe we hear Robert Downey Jr.’s voice, briefly, as Doom.)  I liked seeing how Banner’s situation at the end of Brand New Day was incorporated into the set-up for Doomsday.

Later in the credits, we get my favorite of the four additions, in which we visit the TVA as a full-blown multi-versal crisis erupts, with multiple incursions happening all at the same time.  First off, it was a full-blown delight to get to see the whole TVA gang from Loki back, and on the big screen!!!  This made me so happy!!!  I really hope the TVA is involved in Doomsday and/or Secret Wars.  I’ve been worried that Marvel would think it too confusing to bring in these characters from a TV show.  It’s still possible that the TVA gang aren’t in the movies, and this scene was the one bone thrown to Loki-show fans.  (Though I hope that’s not the case!)  Whatever winds up happening, this scene was a delight.  I was so happy to see Mobius (Owen Wilson) back with the TVA, along with OB (Ke Huy Quan — who gets to deliver the big line at the end of the scene!) and Casey (Eugene Cordero), and even Miss Minutes!!  That was fantastic.  And it’s great to hear the word “incursion” spoken on-screen again, picking up on threads from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (and ideas from Jonathan Hickman’s Secret Wars comic book series).

The final addition came at the very end of the credits.  We hear the clanging of Tony’s forging his first armor, from the original Iron Man, just as we originally heard at the end of Endgame.  But now we see a few quick shots of footage, and Tony’s forging his armor morphs into the forging of the mask of Doom.  That was a very cool moment, and a very clever re-contextualizing of the original ending of Endgame.  My complaint is that it’s all over too fast, in just a few seconds.  I think Marvel has made the mistake several times in their recent films (starting with Endgame, which was the first MCU film to have no end credits scene) of making the audience sit through the long credits only for that post-credits scene to be too much of a nothing.  (I felt this way at the end of Brand New Day.)  I’d have loved to have seen that glimpse of Doom continue into a full scene with Doom, or even a new trailer for Doomsday.  (It was SO EXCITING when the post-credits scene of Captain America: The First Avenger was a trailer for The Avengers!!)

I had a fun time with Encore, more than I’d expected!  I’m really hoping the Russos and the Marvel team can recapture the highs of all four previous Avengers films with the upcoming Doomsday and Secret Wars.  We’ll soon see!!

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