Name: Avengers: Doomsday
Released: 2026-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Avengers: Endgame closed on two goodbyes. Steve Rogers finally got his dance with Peggy Carter, and Tony Stark got the film’s last sound: a hammer on metal, the noise of him forging his very first suit, carried under the credits. Avengers: Endgame Encore, the re-release now back in theaters, keeps both moments and then hands each of them to Avengers: Doomsday.

Most of the explainers running this weekend describe the four new scenes as a primer, homework before the next film. That is accurate, and it misses the more interesting part. Encore does not add a chapter after Endgame. It changes what Endgame’s endings mean, which is one of the oldest moves in the re-release business and one that has rarely aged well.

Going by the scene-by-scene accounts in TheWrap, Screen Rant and SlashFilm, the film now runs one beat past the dance. There is a knock at the door, Peggy answers, and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is standing there in the uniform of the Time Variance Authority from his Disney+ series. Peggy asks if she can help him. “No,” he answers, “but I can help you, both of you.” The credits then carry three more additions. Mark Ruffalo‘s Bruce Banner, alone in a bunker far underground and testing a gamma-suppression serum, is interrupted by the voice of Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom, who has come to “collect” him. At the TVA, Mobius, O.B., Casey and Miss Minutes watch universes collide, among them Earth-10005, the old Fox X-Men universe, until O.B. concludes that the multiverse is collapsing. And at the very end the hammer returns, except that the images now land on Doom’s mask.

Anthony Russo has been candid about the intent. At a post-screening Q&A reported by SlashFilm, he said that “we sort of play one beat past where Steve Rogers’ story ended with Peggy Carter, and in that moment, that’s where Doomsday is born.” Note the verb: ended. The director concedes it was an ending, and Encore turns it into a doorway, complete with a knock. Screen Rant argues the new beat expands Steve’s conclusion rather than retconning it, and technically nothing has been cut. But an ending exists to settle what a story means. A dance that closed a decade of longing now plays as the quiet before a recruitment.

The hammer is the bolder rewrite. In Endgame, that sound was a farewell folded into the credits, the whole Iron Man story walked back to its first act. SlashFilm reads the new version as the tribute recast as something sinister. Nerdist, the most skeptical of the explainers, argues the mask scene adds nothing to Doomsday itself and mainly lets Marvel claim that Endgame had been foreshadowing Doom all along. With Downey now behind Doom’s mask, the studio has handed the actor’s farewell to the actor’s next villain.

Film history has a name for this kind of release. In 1997, George Lucas brought Star Wars back to theaters as a Special Edition with new scenes and effects, and by his own account some of his changes over the years were meant to build continuity with other films. Most of the larger changes landed badly, and “Han shot first” became fan shorthand for a filmmaker re-editing a character after the audience had already decided who he was. Encore is gentler, since it reverses no one’s choices on screen. The logic is kin, though: the later film reaches back and makes the earlier one point toward it.

Not every addition even reaches Doomsday. Nerdist argues that the Banner scene plays like a stray extra from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, pointing toward Secret Wars and Battleworld rather than the December film, while ComicBook.com reads the same scene as Doom gathering lieutenants for Battleworld. Either way, Endgame is now carrying promises for films further down the schedule than the one it is selling.

The business case is not in doubt. Deadline, which called the re-release a Doomsday “marketing stunt,” has Encore opening at No. 1 domestically with an estimated $26 million from 3,060 theaters, ahead of the $25.4 million that last year’s anniversary reissue of Revenge of the Sith took. The record for a re-release opening still belongs to Star Wars in 1997, at $35.9 million: the Special Edition itself. The full rewrite also costs extra. According to Deadline, screens certified for Infinity Vision, Disney’s new premium-format label, show six minutes and 17 seconds of added footage against two minutes and six seconds on standard screens, and Imax and premium large-format screens drove 60% of the weekend.

There is a record in play, too. Endgame sits second on the worldwide all-time chart at $2.799 billion, behind Avatar’s $2.92 billion, and Deadline reports that Disney is waiting to see whether Encore can close that gap before Avengers: Doomsday opens on December 18.

For seven years, Endgame’s final sound was a hammer shaping Tony Stark’s first armor. As of this weekend, in theaters at least, that sound belongs to Doctor Doom’s mask, and the face behind both is Robert Downey Jr.’s.

Tags: Robert Downey Jr., Avengers: Endgame, Avengers: Doomsday, Loki, re-releases