The clearest sign that a plan was never really a plan is how much work it takes to make it look like one after the fact. Marvel has returned Avengers: Endgame to theaters as Endgame: Encore, a re-release the Russo brothers have called the single required viewing before December's Doomsday, and to earn that billing they have grafted new scenes onto a film that ended, seven years ago, on a note of total finality. The additions are meant to build a bridge from the greatest triumph of the last saga to the villain who will close out the current one. What they actually do is expose the seams in a decade of storytelling that never had the through-line it pretended to. Endgame still holds up beautifully but the scenes tacked on clearly belonged elsewhere.
So quick warning for those who haven't seen either the theatrical release or the leaks online, we are going to discuss the new scenes now. The original Endgame famously had no post-credits scene, the first MCU film to withhold one since The Incredible Hulk (technically the scene with Tony and Ross in the bar happens before the credits), a silence that was itself a statement: the story was over, the journey complete, nothing more to tease. Encore breaks that silence four times. Steve and Peggy's dance is extended so that Loki, in his TVA outfit, knocks at the door offering to help with a problem they didn't know they had. A TVA sequence follows, with Mobius and Ouroboros watching the multiverse begin to collapse, taking with it recognizable alternate worlds like the Ang Lee Hulk universe and the 2015 Fantastic Four. A third scene finds Bruce Banner bunkered in a military facility after the Hulk incident from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, working on a serum to suppress his transformations, until Doom breaks in. And the metallic clang that once closed the film's credits, long understood as an echo of Tony Stark forging the first Iron Man armor, is now revealed to be Doctor Doom forging his mask, an explicit parallel between the two characters Robert Downey Jr. has now played.
The Doom-forging reveal is a good beat, and its cleverness is where the problem announces itself. Drawing the line from Stark's armor to Doom's mask, closing the saga on the same image that opened it, is the kind of full-circle flourish that only works if it was always the intent. It was not. The most open secret in the industry is that Doom is a fallback, the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency answer to a Kang plan that collapsed, and every one of these scenes is doing the labor of pretending otherwise. Phases Four, Five, and Six have been sold as the Multiverse Saga, but the more honest name is the studio-interference saga. When Disney acquired Fox, the mandate was to demonstrate the value of that purchase, which meant the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and Kang, and so a slate of films and shows was rushed into development to service that goal rather than a story. The golden goose was carved open to see how much more could be extracted, and these four scenes are the studio going back to the carcass one more time.
The deeper issue is that they are retrofitting a foundation onto a finale, and those are opposite things. Endgame was engineered, deliberately and superbly, to be an ending. "Part of the journey is the end" is spoken more than once in the film itself and featured prominently in every trailer. The destruction of Thanos's ship by Captain Marvel carries the exact valedictory weight of Vader's Super Star Destroyer plunging into the Death Star at the close of Return of the Jedi, the visual language of a saga concluding. This is what a great finale does, but from a franchise-building standpoint, it is Endgame's one true flaw.
A finale gives the audience an off-ramp. It grants permission to feel satisfied and walk away, and to decide you have seen what you needed to see. That is a gift to a viewer and a problem for a studio that intends to keep the machine running for another decade, and no quantity of post-credits scenes bolted on after the fact can convert an exit into an entrance. The scenes want to make Endgame the on-ramp to the Multiverse Saga. It was built as the off-ramp from the Infinity one, and the tension between those two functions is irreconcilable.
That tension curdles the ending's emotional logic, too. The extended Steve-and-Peggy scene takes the most earned beat in the entire saga and destabilizes it. The whole architecture of Endgame rests on the inversion of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers: Steve is the man who lays himself on the wire, the one who always makes the sacrifice play, and Tony is the one who finally does, dying so that Steve can at last have the ordinary life he never took. Steve gets his dance. Tony gets the sacrifice. Reopening that door to reveal that Steve's happy ending is actually the seed of the multiverse's collapse, that his moment of peace somehow sets Doomsday in motion, does not deepen the ending so much as it taxes it, retroactively charging a completed emotional transaction with new debt. It feels like exactly what it is, a beloved conclusion being pried back open because the business needs it to keep going. In a way, this is not dissimilar from the retcon in Secret Invasion where the Rhodes who mourned the death of Tony Stark and was present when he died was actually a Skrull the whole time.
None of this had to be the case, and the frustrating part is how visible the better version is. Nearly every one of these scenes would have landed more organically almost anywhere else. The Banner-and-Doom bunker scene should simply have been the post-credits tag on Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where it would have generated hype for Doomsday off a film people were already watching for the first time. The multiverse-collapse TVA sequence would have been better served attached to Thunderbolts or The Fantastic Four, alongside the Doom material those films were already carrying, than dropped onto a seven-year-old movie. Scattering these teases across the recent slate, letting them accrete naturally, would have built the connective tissue the saga always lacked. Instead they arrive all at once, retroactively, which only underscores that the connection was assembled in hindsight rather than planned.
Even with the Kang swap, the other connective tissue could have felt more intentional if these scenes were attached to other movies. Clea showed up in Multiverse of Madness to tell Strange that an incursion is coming. An incursion happens at the end of The Marvels and Monica ends up in the Fox X-Men universe. Deadpool and Wolverine takes place mostly in the Void with characters whose home universes were destroyed. Imagine if after The Marvels revealed Beast, Brave New World had the TVA scene with the multiverse collapse? That would have felt a lot better and gave people who may have skipped Loki more time to watch it.
The real lesson sits one level up, in the pacing of the whole enterprise. The Infinity Saga took eleven years, from 2008 to 2019, to build to Infinity War and Endgame, and even then its setup was imperfect. The Multiverse Saga has tried to do the equivalent work in a fraction of that time, and it shows, because so much of the necessary groundwork got compressed into the last year or two, which is why everything now feels rushed. Some of that was nobody's fault, the death of Chadwick Boseman had to be reckoned with, and the studio's reluctance to recast cost real time. But much of it was a choice, the choice to chase a destination before laying the road to it. The wiser move after Endgame would have been a holding pattern, a smaller, self-contained Avengers story to keep the pieces on the board without the pressure to top what came before, something as low-stakes as another Ultron, a villain who can always return so long as a single copy of his code survives. Take the breath, reassemble the team, then launch the next mega-arc from stable ground. Marvel did not, and Encore is the sound of the studio trying to lay that groundwork retroactively, five years and a dozen films too late.
Endgame itself ages well; the effects hold, the emotional beats still land, and seeing it on a big screen again is a genuine pleasure that a living-room rewatch would not have matched. But the Encore additions are a confession disguised as a victory lap. They admit, in four short scenes, that the plan was improvised, that the ending was too good at being an ending, and that the road to Doomsday is being paved in reverse. It is hard to walk out of that and feel more optimistic about December, and easy to walk out understanding exactly why the Multiverse Saga has felt, for years now, like a story being told by a studio that killed its own goose and keeps returning to see what is left.
