Severe Warning: Do New Footage in Avengers: Endgame Reveal the Truth About Doctor Doom? | Movies

DDoes it really matter which film grossed the most of all time at the worldwide box office? Will James Cameron lie awake at night, staring into the darkness and wondering if he should take away humanity’s access to the giant, blue-skinned space elves out of pure spite, simply because Avatar was once again dethroned by Avengers: Endgame? This seems unlikely. Are the Russo brothers leaping and frolicking with wild abandon because the addition of a few new scenes and the release of their film for the umpteenth time has led to this momentous changing of the guard? Probably not. Is a Disney accountant holding a little awards ceremony somewhere where every nominee is themselves? Well yes, absolutely, because the house of mice ultimately owns both films.

And yet the most interesting thing about Avengers: Endgame’s return to theaters isn’t how much money it made – for the record, the re-release, titled Avengers Endgame: Encore, had grossed another $126 million worldwide as of last weekend, bringing its lifetime total to around $2.925 billion (just ahead of Avatar’s $2.923 billion) – but what Marvel added to the picture while we were all busy counting.

Premium format presentations of the new release feature a new scene at the end of the film and three others during and after the credits, with some also appearing during standard screenings. The idea is presumably that these tantalizing snippets will guide viewers smoothly into the next Avengers: Doomsday with the kind of spring in the step that can only come from the belief that they are now three small clues away from understanding the mind of Kevin Feige.

The original Endgame featured a final shot of Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, who apparently used Tony Stark’s discovery of time travel to return to the 1940s, dancing contentedly with Hayley Atwell’s Peggy Carter. In the new version, the couple are interrupted by a knock at the door, only to find Tom Hiddleston’s Loki standing outside, offering to help them. Given that the Norse trickster ended Loki season two holding the multiverse’s branching timelines together, it’s unlikely he’s just a neighbor coming to complain about the hedge. We’re probably meant to infer that whatever is wrong with reality is bad enough to get to Steve even in his carefully planned retirement, and that his happy ending may now have to be put on hold. The man defeated the Nazis and helped reverse the extinction of half life, but apparently he still hasn’t accrued enough annual leave to complete a dance.

The second scene appears over the credits and finds Bruce Banner locked in an underground facility following the events of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, trying to keep his inner Hulk in check. As if things couldn’t get worse, the voice of Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom is heard announcing that he has come to “recover” the troubled scientist. It’s not entirely clear whether he wants Banner’s genius, Hulk’s muscles, or something considerably less enjoyable, but it seems safe to assume he’s not putting together a pub quiz team.

A second mid-credits scene sees Mobius (Owen Wilson), OB (Ke Huy Quan), and Casey (Eugene Cordero) of the Time Variance Authority – whose organization is charged, following the events of Loki season two, with protecting the branching timelines it once ruthlessly pruned – watching in horror as universes collide and disappear by the thousands. Above all, the reality inhabited by the X-Men at the time of 20th Century Fox is one of those that is threatened. In the comics, similar forays play out across Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers, culminating in the Time Runs Out storyline and leading into the Secret Wars event of 2015. The main Marvel and Ultimate universes are the last to be destroyed, after which Doctor Doom gathers the remains of crumbling realities into the patchwork planet Battleworld. Could Doomsday see the Fox Universe, the retro-futuristic reality occupied by the Fantastic Four, and the main Marvel Cinematic Universe similarly stitched together, with Doom appointing himself as ruler of all that survives?

Encore’s final scene comes after the credits and reworks Endgame’s original audio farewell: Tony Stark building his first Iron Man armor in an Afghan cave. The new version combines hammer blows with flashing images, culminating in a final, ominous shot of Doctor Doom’s mask. Is Marvel trying to tell us that the Latvian wizard is really a Stark variant after all? Or is the studio simply exploiting the unsettling associations of a familiar din coming from the evil metal face? Either way, the filmmakers clearly want us to remember Tony Stark until Doomsday, and perhaps think about what part of the man who saved the universe might be hiding inside the one who now threatens it.

This is admittedly a more intriguing setup than one might expect from a common or garden Marvel mashup. If Doom has the face of a lost friend and the power to offer ravaged worlds even the slightest glimpse of a future beyond torture and oblivion, resisting him might take more than Thor to locate a larger-than-usual hammer.

What is clear is that Marvel has somehow persuaded audiences to pay again for a film they already know, and then rewarded them with news that his retirement is off, that Hulk’s attempts to retreat from public life have failed, and that existence itself is collapsing. Somewhere, this Disney accountant is probably giving himself a lifetime achievement award.