Avengers: Endgame is top of the box office, Trump is President, and Zendaya has pop culture in the palm of her hand. I’m sorry, is this 2026 or 2019?
Ahead of Avengers: Doomsday in December, Marvel has rereleased the prior Avengers movie Endgame in cinemas to get fans even hungrier for the next installment. But this is not your run of the mill rerelease, as tacked on is roughly four scenes of brand-new footage that directly sets up the events of Doomsday. The directors say it’s because they envision Doomsday as a direct sequel to Endgame, but in truth it feels like a passive confession that they have failed to buildup the new movie in the years they had to play with.
Is Encore worth your time? Well, I’ve seen it in cinemas and I am here to give the enlightened opinion of it depends. As a trip down memory lane, it does work if the audience you’re with is willing to get hyped all over again and wasn’t full of 12-year-old boys throwing popcorn at each other like my screening was. I found myself having a mostly good time getting to reimagine myself watching it in 2019 for the first time, still one of my most cherished movie memories. But about 45 minutes in I was suddenly hit by the revelation that I came out of my way to watch a movie readily available on Disney+ from the comfort of my own home. I literally watched this on Channel 4 about two weeks ago, for crying out loud. That was when I understood I really took this time to watch about three minutes of new content out of a three hour movie.
So, does Encore work as a setup for Doomsday? Not really. I’m not going to spoil the four (I say four tenuously, one scene lasts about two seconds) pieces of new footage that were added, but I will say most of them feel underwhelming. They are added haphazardly and if you think about them as setting up a sequel to Endgame like the directors wanted you will leave totally confused. Only one truly felt like an unexpected sneak peek that gave me something interesting to chew on before Doomsday, but that one carries the caveat of feeling like it better belonged in another MCU project released this year. All in all, these breadcrumbs felt stale.
As an experience of nostalgia or even a chance to watch Endgame in a cinema for the first time ever, Encore mostly delivers on that promise. But as a bridge into the most ambitious crossover Marvel has ever attempted, it fell far short of what was promised.
Photo by N I F T Y A R T on Unsplash.
