The number turned up in a ticketing listing before it turned up in a press release, and that is the first thing worth noticing here. AMC Theatres currently has “Avengers: Endgame Encore” running three hours and five minutes when it comes back to theaters on September 25. The 2019 cut ran three hours and one minute. That leaves roughly four minutes of genuinely new film to carry everything Marvel has been promising since June, which is either the most efficient piece of setup the studio has ever attempted or a much smaller thing than the word “Encore” has been doing the work of implying.
Four minutes is not nothing. It is also not a bridge, and Marvel has spent the summer calling it one. When the Encore was announced back in June, the package on offer was a recorded introduction from directors Joe and Anthony Russo, never-before-seen footage set inside the Doomsday story, and an exclusive post-credits sequence pointing at the Phase 6 conflict. Try fitting all three of those into four minutes and the arithmetic tightens in a hurry, because a director introduction on its own can comfortably swallow ninety seconds before a single frame of Doctor Doom shows up.
There is also the small matter that none of this is official. The runtime is a theater listing, not a Marvel Studios announcement, and listings get quietly corrected all the time. Back in July the figure going around was seven extra minutes, sourced to a scooper on social media rather than to anyone at Disney, and it has since been overtaken by a number that is three minutes smaller and considerably more boring. Our experience is that the boring number is usually the real one, but we are still reading a box office listing rather than a statement, and that distinction is the whole reason to hold this loosely. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Avengers: Endgame” and for the setup leading into “Avengers: Doomsday.”
Four minutes is not nothing. It is also not a bridge, and Marvel has spent the summer calling it one.”
What we do have is Joe Russo describing the thing in his own words, and he has been noticeably more specific than the marketing has. “It’s critically important to re-release the movie, and, in fact, we’ll be re-releasing the film with footage that is set in the Doomsday story that we have added to Avengers: Endgame,” he said. He has called the result a critical companion story, and framed it as a chance to bridge the two films by carrying characters he has worked with for years straight into the next one. That is not a man describing a nostalgia lap with a bonus scene stapled to the end of it, and if you take him at his word, the four minutes are load-bearing rather than decorative.
The detail that gives the whole thing teeth is when the footage was shot. Both Russos have confirmed the new material was filmed during production on ‘Doomsday’ itself, which means these are not deleted scenes pulled off a 2019 hard drive and dusted down for a victory lap. They are new scenes, made in 2026, with a 2026 production’s cast and crew, cut into a film that came out seven years ago. That is a fundamentally different proposition, and it is the reason four minutes might land harder than four minutes has any right to.
Where those minutes actually go is the question nobody has answered, and the honest reply is that we do not know yet. The theories doing the rounds point at the Time Heist and at Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) choosing to stay in the past with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), on the reasoning that both are load-bearing for wherever ‘Doomsday’ takes the timeline. That is outlet speculation rather than reporting, and we are flagging it as speculation rather than passing it off as a scoop. Nobody at Marvel has said which scenes get touched, and a studio that has kept Doctor Doom’s face out of most of its own marketing is not about to give the answer away in August.
If we are guessing, and we are, the Time Heist is the obvious place to point a camera. It is the one sequence in the film that physically revisits the entire franchise, it already establishes that branching realities are a consequence rather than a theory, and it is where a figure watching from outside the frame costs the least to insert. Drop Victor Von Doom (Robert Downey Jr.) into the corner of a scene the audience has watched a hundred times and you rewrite what the sequence means without laying a finger on the original performances. As ChronoCut problems go, that is the cheapest and cleanest solution available to them, and it would explain why four minutes is enough.
The other reason to care is calendar positioning, which is where the Encore stops being fan service and starts being a business decision. “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” already came and went in July. ‘Doomsday’ lands on December 18. September 25 sits in the dead middle of that gap, a stretch where Marvel has nothing else in theaters and a great deal of anticipation to keep warm, and re-releasing your highest-grossing film with four minutes of setup baked into it is a far cheaper way to fill that hole than making something new to put in it.
It is also, and we say this with real affection for the run, a little bit of a confession. Marvel is reaching back to 2019 because 2019 was the last time the entire audience turned up at once, and the studio plainly knows it. The Encore works as a reminder of what this thing felt like when it was firing on everything, and simultaneously as an admission that ‘Doomsday’ needs the reminder in a way that “Avengers: Infinity War” never needed one. Whether four minutes of new footage justifies the price of a ticket is a question every reader gets to answer on their own, and a fair number of people were buying one regardless.
Our honest read is that the runtime is the least glamorous number attached to this project and easily the most useful. Four minutes tells you this is connective tissue rather than a director’s cut, which means anyone walking in expecting a restructured “Avengers: Endgame” is going to walk back out irritated. It also means those four minutes have to be surgical, and the Russo brothers have never been shy about doing an enormous amount of damage in a very small space. We will find out on September 25, assuming the listing holds and Marvel does not quietly add a minute somewhere between now and then.
What Do You Think? Is four minutes of new footage genuinely enough to set up “Avengers: Doomsday,” or is the Encore a nostalgia play with a trailer attached to the end of it? If the new material really does sit inside the Time Heist, does that retroactively change what the 2019 film was about, or is it just a cameo in a corner? And are you buying a ticket to watch a movie you already own for four minutes you have never seen?
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