Encore! Encore! - Avengers: Endgame (Encore)
The following contains spoilers for the Marvel Cinematic Universe but also definitely Avengers: Endgame.
Seven years ago Avengers: Endgame was an experience unlike anything else Marvel had made. A final punctuation mark to a saga spanning more than twenty films, it somehow managed to do that while teasing a canvas of a brand new frontier that might go on forever.
Now, Endgame is back in theaters. The big hook for getting people to go back? Footage connecting Avengers: Doomsday to Avengers: Endgame in an effort to juice excitement and ticket sales for a movie that has done minimal work to build to its purported culmination. These films' directors (Joe & Anthony Russo) have called seeing this Encore "absolutely necessary" and adding "if you saw Endgame when it was originally released, you couldn't see this coming."
For all of my skepticism of Marvel Studios' current zeitgeist, I'm also not immune from this shameless attempt to reignite the hype machine that carried Marvel to $30b at the worldwide box office. I went. And it was the first time I've seen Endgame since back to back screenings opening night. And... it was an interesting experience.
What made Endgame so special...
In the years since Endgame, Marvel has exploded with stories and media to slake their most hardcore fanbase. 15 movies and more than a dozen television series in six years. While there were some interesting offerings early (Shang Chi, The Eternals), they quickly retreated to the safe space of "another Captain America political/espionage thriller" and "let's pair up Wolverine & Deadpool maybe?". The Multiverse Saga (as Marvel labeled it) left tons and tons of setups that will never pay off. Forget The Eternals entirely (because that movie basically doesn't exist). There's little chance we'll see Harry Styles's Starfox do anything but walk out of that portal. Marvel wisely fled from Quantumania's Society of Kangs. Hercules is always an option for a future Thor movie (I guess) and there is a rumor that Charlize Theron's Clea will be in Doomsday (but we'll find that out in a few months). But all of this is TBD. It's also not really worth getting mad about, either. Marvel has been teasing upcoming movies since Iron Man.
... except. Endgame doesn't.
There's wild fun and back-patting in Endgame, especially in that middle hour. No one asked to revisit Thor: The Dark World, but it provided an opportunity for Thor to have a tearful farewell with his mom. Meanwhile, revisiting the Battle of New York reignites the fizzy bombast of the MCU's til-then most signature third act. Tilda Swinton's Ancient One winds back time, pulling Phase Three into contemporary Marvel. And Peter Quill's dancing to his Walkman is a giddy excuse to recall Marvel's first big audacious experiment. And they go further, bringing back a lot of Winter Soldier, not just in invoking Hydra but also riffing on that movie's famous elevator fight. And on and on. It's truly a victory lap.
By the time the credits roll, there's really nothing left to say. Just the OG Avengers signing their names like in The Undiscovered Country while Alan Silvestri's indelible score proclaims "it's over." There is no post-credits scene. Just the soft clinks of Tony hammering out the first version of the Iron Man armor, connecting it all back to the beginning while also hinting that while it's over, the story will always live on.
Before that is the key moment. Endgame features Tony's death (spoilers) sure. But it's also the promised end for Cap, who uses time travel technology to get that long-coveted dance with Peggy. It's a perfect, glorious ending to pay off the best final line in the MCU. All is right in the world.
Joss Whedon's Avengers movies (while satisfying on their own terms) end on moments of resolution while still teasing what's to come. That doesn't happen here. And the farther away we get from Endgame the more it's clear that everything Marvel does to define "this is the ending" is its great strength.
But... Endgame already made its money, and an ending doesn't help Marvel Studios print more money. This multi-billion dollar enterprise must continue. And they're seriously flop sweating about their forthcoming half-billion dollar gamble.
Rewriting the past
It felt obvious what the Russos were going to do. They teased that the final moments of Endgame Encore would lead "directly" into events of Avengers: Doomsday. Given that the movie itself is fairly airtight, it's not surprising that they decided to crack open the film's final beat, having Loki interrupt Cap & Peggy's glorious "happily ever after". It's also not surprising that they add two more post-credits scenes (and a couple flashes) that help tie in Doomsday even more specifically.
The Hulk one is whatever. A moment designed to tease the menace of Doctor Doom and make it personal. The Time Variance Authority witnessing the multiversal apocalypse sets the stakes of Doom and whatever it is he's doing. Definitely something that perfectly fits into Endgame and its narrative. Even the Hulk scene comes from the status quo at the end of Spider-man: Brand New Day, not anything to do with Endgame.
But that last beat is perverse. Endgame ended with the tink of a hammer, Encore reveals flashes over the sound. Only surprise. It's not Tony creating his armor. It's Doom forging his. Which was always the plan, right? What a plot twist.
Like George Lucas before them, Marvel can add to their films ex post facto, retconning earlier choices in the name of a fuller, more comprehensive experience after years of time have passed. While it might harm the altered product moving forward, such meddling won't take away from memories.
And yet, sitting through Marvel retconning the greatest "ending" in cinematic saga history, it's impossible to not let Encore highlight all the mistakes Marvel has made since Endgame. Back to the Future is a major touchstone for producer Kevin Feige, and the trailer for Back to the Future Part III that followed Part II's "To Be Concluded..." has served as the north star for Marvel's post-credit scenes since their inception. And now Feige has finally gotten his "Marty speeding around the corner, one second after Doc looks up at the clocktower" moment. Peggy & Steve's impossibly satisfying happily ever after lasts for two seconds before Loki comes in to drop another movie on Steve. It's functionally the same "Relax, Doc! It's me! It's me! It's Marty!" only played for "oh shit" ominous as opposed to the exhilaration of a cliffhanger.
In doing this, though, Loki's return in Encore misunderstands what makes the Back to the Future Part II cliffhanger so utterly thrilling. Let's set aside that Gale & Zemeckis wrote and filmed Parts II & III together (meaning the cliffhanger has an ending already in mind).
Half of Part II is about Marty & Doc threatening to collide with events of the original film. It's a dozen near misses that all enhance the enjoyment of the first installment in retrospect, running a parallel narrative in roughly the same slice of time and space. It's only after Doc's 1955 story finishes that Marty comes racing into blurry focus in the far-off distance. Back to the Future functionally finishes. And now we find out what happens to Doc Brown next. It doesn't shit on Back to the Future, or take away from the Doc's glorious triumph at sending Marty through time. It has reverence for that moment, and then allows for a brief sidequest that will just be a blip in the Doc's life afterwards.
More importantly, though, Marty catalyzes the cliffhanger. It's Part II Marty who collides with the original film Doc to beget what's about to be Part III. The audience can engage with the cliffhanger because it's the end of a journey that started with the DeLorean arriving in 2015.
But imagine that this was a moment in the original Back to the Future. Or Zemeckis went back and edited the Part II cliffhanger into Back to the Future because that's what happens in Encore. It wouldn't work. Partially because Back to the Future is Marty's story. But also because an alternate, future version of Marty crashing into literal Back to the Future is at the very least apocryphal and at worst deeply incongruous. For Encore's cliffhanger to work, it needs to be the final scene of the movie that brings Loki to Cap's door, not a random intrusion on a story that's done nothing to tee that moment up.
(And yes, I'm ignoring that there's a ton of other Loki stuff going on here. None of that actually matters to what's going on...)
The same is true for the flashes of forging Doctor Doom's armor. My theater rippled with excitement at seeing these brief flashes of green and metal. And the implication is that it rewrites the ending of Endgame. Before, the clanging was a moment of wistful imagination and memory. Now, it's a moment of "okay but Doom's coming" while also seeming to pretend like the intention was always to bring in Doctor Doom as the next Avengers baddie. As though Endgame is the pretext for the rise of a character who's not appeared yet even though there's more than a dozen films (and even more television series) that could have started that ball rolling.
Nevermind that Marvel put all their chips in on Kang and Jonathan Majors for the Multiverse Saga until that blew up in their face.
Nevermind that Robert Downey Jr. was absolutely done with the MCU after Endgame because the dude was costing them an outrageous cut of their box office every time he showed up.
Nevermind that Doom was not going to be the villain of the next Avengers movie, and that even if he was, there's no way it was going to be an alternate multiverse version of Tony Stark.
Nevermind that Marvel is paying RDJ the entire budget of Alien: Romulus just to get him back.
It's a naked admission of just how creatively desperate Marvel is at the moment. Bullshit this was the plan. And Marvel smashing open a legitimately good ending to undermine it and say "but wait there's actually more to come and it secretly started here" is cannibalizing one of its greatest achievements in the name of trying to make Doomsday float.
Marvel didn't ruin a childhood or rewrite any memory with Endgame Encore. But it made the movie less special. And while up until the knock at the door I was feeling insanely positive at the miracle that was Endgame, the entire credits sequence was a stew of utter bafflement. If Endgame is about three hours of trying to leave audiences satisfied, Encore is four desperate minutes of trying to make the audience scream for something entirely different. Worse, there is a world where this becomes the new default version of Endgame that Disney makes available to the public, reducing one of Marvel's unique, crowning achievements into what they never designed it to be.
At least the Hayden Christensen Force Ghost was an attempt to close the book on a particular overarching narrative. Instead, Avengers: Endgame Encore is hastily gluing scribbled pages into the back of a finished work in the hopes that the next Avengers movie will make over a billion dollars.
But this is the logical endpoint of IP-based storytelling. These stories can never just "be." If there is more blood to squeeze from the stone, Disney is going to figure out how to do it. Damn the consequences. Damn the experience.
And yeah. I went anyway. I'm glad I did, but not for any of the reasons that Disney probably wants. It disgruntled me towards Doomsday and reminded me of just how far Marvel has drifted from when it was reliably consistent and/or great.
Hell of a thing to do for a movie predicated on why it's a bad idea rewrite the past.
If there's a silver lining, at least no one's ever going to complain about a big budget, pro-environmental, anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-military, corny, emotional, original science-fiction blockbuster as the number one movie of all time. Instead, we can celebrate a movie that rode to second place on the wave of being an ending, and usurped the top spot by betraying that core virtue.
Why worry about Doomsday? It's already come.