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I own Avengers: Endgame. Not in some abstract "I've seen it" way — I mean I have paid actual money for this specific three-hour movie at least four times across theaters, a digital rental I didn't need, and a physical disc that's still in its shrink wrap. And this Friday, I'm almost certainly going to pay for it a fifth time. Not because the movie changed. Because six minutes of it didn't exist until now, and Marvel has spent the past month making sure I know that.
That's the whole trick behind Avengers: Endgame Encore, which opens September 25 in theaters that have already sold most of their opening-weekend IMAX and "Infinity Vision" slots. It's the same 2019 film, still three hours and one minute long, still ending with the same snap and the same beach. What's different is what happens after the credits roll, and around six minutes of footage Marvel is calling essential viewing before Avengers: Doomsday arrives December 18. Variety's box office trackers have Encore projected to open to $25 million to $28 million domestic, which would be enough to knock Resident Evil off the top spot in its second weekend. A seven-year-old movie, beating this year's new releases, on the strength of a few extra minutes nobody's seen yet. Except, as of this week, a lot of people already have.
Six minutes for a full ticket price sounds like a rip-off on paper, and a decent chunk of the internet is calling it exactly that. I don't fully disagree. But I also think that framing misses what's actually being sold here. This isn't really a rerelease. It's the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday that Marvel gets to control completely, wrapped around a movie people already love enough to watch a third time. Judged as a rerelease, it's thin. Judged as marketing, it might be the smartest thing Marvel's done all year — and I'll explain why further down, once you've seen what's actually in it.
What's actually new in the theater cut
Strip away the hype and the new material breaks into two pieces. First, a reworked ending that threads new imagery into the film's final stretch, tying it more directly to where Doomsday picks up. Second, a set of post-credits scenes — most reporting settles on four, though the early online chatter argued about the exact count and order for a few confusing days. Marvel is dressing all of this up with a new format tier called Infinity Vision, certified auditoriums with larger screens and brighter, sharper projection, and it's using access as a carrot: IMAX and Infinity Vision screenings get an additional short Doomsday preview that a standard multiplex showing doesn't. Korea got Encore a couple of days ahead of the wide release, and that head start is exactly how the new scenes ended up online before most of the world had a legal way to see them.
None of this is subtle, and I don't think it's supposed to be. Joe Russo, who directed Endgame and is back for Doomsday, has been calling Encore "required viewing" for anyone walking into the December movie. That's a strong claim for six minutes bolted onto a seven-year-old film, and it only makes sense once you realize what those six minutes are actually doing: quietly catching up anyone who checked out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe after 2019, without making them do homework first. Disney has even published its own 15-title watchlist for people who want the full context. Encore is the version for everyone else.
The leak: four scenes, one very busy weekend for Disney's takedown team
Once Encore started screening in South Korea, the usual thing happened: someone filmed it, and within a day, detailed scene-by-scene write-ups were circulating on Reddit and X. By Tuesday, actual clips had leaked too, and Disney's legal team was pulling them down almost as fast as they were reposted. I'm not going to link to the footage, but I've read enough overlapping, independently-posted descriptions from separate leakers to feel comfortable laying out the broad strokes, with the caveat that a couple of small details are still disputed between accounts.
The first scene returns to the alternate timeline where Steve Rogers stayed behind to live a life with Peggy Carter. It's a quiet, almost domestic beat — the two of them together, an unexpected visitor at the door — before Loki shows up and offers to help them with something the scene doesn't specify. The second reunites us with Bruce Banner, now in isolation after the events of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and tinkering with a new way to control the Hulk. According to the leaks, Doctor Doom interrupts him, heard but never shown on screen, saying he's come to collect him — and what follows is implied to be Doom taking something from Banner by force. The third is more impressionistic: flashes of Doom assembling his mask, cut against the sound of Tony Stark building his very first suit back in 2008. And the fourth drops us at the Time Variance Authority, where staff realize two entire realities are colliding and destroying each other, among them the universes tied to Fox's pre-Disney X-Men and Fantastic Four movies.
Marvel hasn't confirmed a word of this, and there's a real chance some detail here gets revised once everyone's actually seen the finished cut in a real theater instead of a shaky phone recording. But taken together, the pattern is obvious even secondhand: this is Marvel using a beloved rerelease as cover to drop real, plot-relevant Doomsday setup into the world, in a way that feels like a discovery instead of a trailer.
Every time Marvel has sent Endgame back into theaters
This isn't even the first time Disney has played this exact card. In June 2019, just two months after Endgame's original release, Marvel quietly rereleased it with a deleted Hulk sequence, a Stan Lee tribute, and a first look at Spider-Man: Far From Home tacked onto the end. I went and looked up what that rerelease actually did at the box office, because I think the comparison says more than either weekend does on its own.
| Release | New content | Opening or added weekend | What it was for |
|---|---|---|---|
| ReleaseOriginal release (Apr 2019) | New contentNone — first release | Opening or added weekend$357M domestic / ~$1.2B worldwide | What it was forThen the biggest opening weekend in box office history |
| Release"Post-Credits" rerelease (Jun 2019) | New contentDeleted Hulk scene, Stan Lee tribute, Far From Home teaser | Opening or added weekend$5.5M domestic that weekend (up from $1.9M the week before) | What it was forClosed the gap with Avatar's worldwide record — succeeded about three weeks later |
| ReleaseEndgame Encore (Sep 2026) | New contentNew ending + up to four post-credits scenes (~6 min), Doomsday setup | Opening or added weekend$25M–$28M domestic (projected) | What it was forBuild box office and story momentum for Avengers: Doomsday |
2019 figures per Deadline and Box Office Mojo weekend data; 2026 projection per Variety's tracking, as reported by Cosmic Book News and AOL. Endgame's worldwide total currently sits at roughly $2.799 billion, still the No. 2 film of all time behind Avatar, even after Spider-Man: Brand New Day passed it domestically this August.
What jumps out to me is the gap in scale. The 2019 rerelease added a genuinely small amount of money — $5.5 million domestic against a movie that had already made $2.74 billion — and its job wasn't really to make money, it was to close a $37 million gap with Avatar over several weeks of steady, unglamorous re-releases in dwindling theater counts. It worked, eventually, days before that year's Comic-Con. Encore isn't chasing a record; Endgame isn't threatening to overtake Avatar this time; there's no finish line to cross. It's chasing attention, at a scale roughly five times bigger than the 2019 stunt, pointed at a movie three months away instead of a number on a scoreboard. That's a more ambitious use of the same trick, and it's why I don't think the two rereleases are really comparable in intent, even though the playbook — new footage, limited exclusivity, a beloved movie as the delivery vehicle — is identical.
My spoiler-risk meter: ranking the four leaked scenes
Nobody else seems to be doing this, so here's my own read on which of the four leaked scenes you should actually worry about knowing ahead of time, ranked from "tells you the least" to "arguably reveals the most about where Doomsday is headed." This is entirely my own judgment call, not anything Marvel or a leaker has said.
| Rank | Scene | Why I ranked it here |
|---|---|---|
| Rank4th — Safest | SceneLoki visits Steve & Peggy | WhyA lovely character beat that raises a question without answering it. Knowing it happens doesn't tell you what Loki wants, so I think it's the safest of the four to have spoiled. |
| Rank3rd | SceneDoom's mask / Stark's first suit | WhyThematically rich — the two great tinkerers of the MCU, mirrored — but it's mood, not plot. It tells you how Doomsday wants you to feel about Doom, not what he's going to do. |
| Rank2nd | SceneDoom confronts Banner | WhyThis one actually moves the plot: if the leaks hold up, it establishes Doom's methods before the movie even starts, and that's the kind of thing I'd rather have discovered in the theater. |
| Rank1st — Biggest giveaway | SceneTVA multiverse collision | WhyThis is the one doing real narrative work. It sets the actual stakes of Doomsday — which realities are colliding and why — before a single frame of the new movie has aired. If you only avoid one leak, avoid this one. |
Can six minutes actually beat Resident Evil?
On paper, yes, and it wouldn't even be close to Encore's ceiling. Resident Evil is projected for $24 million to $26 million in its second weekend, a normal and healthy drop from the $60 million debut we covered last week; horror front-loads its audience, so that's not a sign of trouble for Cregger's movie. Encore is tracking at $25 million to $28 million, which puts the two films close enough that either could technically win the weekend depending on how Friday actually plays out. Three new wide releases are also opening into the same weekend — Brad Pitt's The Heart of the Beast, Robert Pattinson's Primetime, and DreamWorks' animated Forgotten Island — each projected in the $15 million to $20 million range, which tells you this is a genuinely crowded Friday for a seven-year-old rerelease to be fighting its way to the top of.
I'd bet on Encore taking first place, for a reason that has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with incentive. Resident Evil's remaining audience mostly wants to see a new movie once. Encore's audience is being asked to see an old movie again, specifically because it now contains something they haven't seen — and thanks to the leaks, a lot of them now know exactly what that something is, and want to see it properly instead of on a shaky vertical phone recording. Spoilers, in this one specific case, might be functioning as free advertising instead of a deterrent. That's a strange sentence to write, but I think it's true.
Why the stunt works on me, even knowing it's a stunt
Here's the part where I stop reporting and just tell you what I actually think, because I've turned this over in my head more than a six-minute rerelease probably deserves. I know exactly what this is. It's the same instinct that gets a mobile game to put a "50% off, ends in 4 hours" banner over an item that was never going to cost more. I know the six minutes exist because a marketing department decided a trailer buried inside a beloved movie will hit differently than a trailer running before one, and they're right, and I resent being right about them being right.
And yet. I think about the theater on opening night in 2019 more than I think about almost any other movie experience I've had — a room full of strangers audibly losing it when Cap said the line, then losing it again for Cap picking up the hammer, then again, and again, for two and a half hours until the credits actually rolled and nobody moved for a solid minute. That feeling doesn't transfer to streaming. It barely survives a second viewing at home. What Encore is selling, underneath the marketing math, is a controlled, once-every-few-years chance to have that feeling again, in public, with people who showed up for the same reason you did. Six new minutes is a thin excuse. But it's an excuse, and sometimes that's all a good excuse needs to be.
The part that would actually bother me is if this became routine — if every franchise started treating "new post-credits scene" as a way to squeeze one more weekend out of a catalog title every few months. That would cheapen it fast, the same way constant remasters have cheapened the word "remastered." Marvel's own history argues this stays rare: seven years between the last one and this one is a real gap, not a quarterly gimmick. As long as it stays that spaced out, and as long as what's inside is actually connected to something new rather than just repackaged nostalgia, I don't mind being the audience for it. I'll probably see it twice.
