The new footage in “Avengers: Endgame Encore” has leaked two days before the film returns to theaters. Grainy phone recordings from preview screenings went up on Reddit, moved to X and have been bouncing around ever since while Marvel files copyright strikes behind them. Gizmodo calls the takedowns “whack-a-mole,” and the supercuts keep coming back. The footage runs about four minutes in total. It changes the ending of “Endgame”, adds two scenes after the credits, and points every one of them at “Avengers: Doomsday”.
Here is what several outlets agree on. The film now ends with Loki knocking on Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter’s door. A new scene at the TVA shows Mobius and Ouroboros watching universes collide. And a final scene puts Bruce Banner in a sealed bunker, where Doctor Doom comes to get him. Marvel has confirmed none of it. The “Encore” opens on Friday, September 25th, and “Doomsday” follows on December 18th. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Avengers: Endgame Encore” and for what its new scenes set up in “Avengers: Doomsday”.
It changes the ending of “Endgame”, adds two scenes after the credits, and points every one of them at “Avengers: Doomsday”.”
Start with the ending, because it is the only part that touches a finished film. In 2019 “Endgame” closed on Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) dancing with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) in a house in the past. The new cut keeps going. Loki (Tom Hiddleston) turns up at their door, and the audience applause in the recordings drowns out most of what he says. The line that has been transcribed is short: “No, but I can help you, both of you.” Cap steps forward and the two of them trade a worried look.
That scene quietly picks a side in the oldest argument about “Endgame”. The film’s writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, said Steve lived out his life in the main timeline and was married to Peggy in the background of history all along. The directors, Joe and Anthony Russo, said he must have made a branch reality instead. Both camps have been quoted for years, and Marvel never settled it. A Loki who has to show up and “help” them only makes sense if something about that life is broken. That is the Russo reading, and it now has footage behind it.
It also creates a problem the leak does not solve. At the end of “Endgame” an old Steve is sitting on a bench by the lake, and he hands his shield to Sam Wilson. That scene is still in the film. If Loki moves Steve and Peggy somewhere else, then how does old Steve get back to that bench? Either the bench scene happens before Loki’s visit in Steve’s own life, or the new ending is cutting against the old one. Nothing in the recordings explains which.
One account goes further, and it should be treated carefully. A single outlet reports that Loki offers to move the couple to a universe where neither of them has a variant, and that the move somehow leads to the deaths of Doctor Doom’s family. That would tie the “Encore” straight into the “Doomsday” Special Look, which opened on a nursery, a newborn and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) remembering Victor as the smartest man in every room. It is a neat fit. It is also one source, and nobody else has it yet. Until a second outlet or the film itself backs it up, it is a rumor.
The TVA scene is simpler and better sourced. Owen Wilson’s Mobius is running an emergency at headquarters while two universes close in on each other on the monitors. Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) delivers the line that sums up the next film: “the multiverse is collapsing”. Several descriptions mention a picture of Loki on the wall and the timelines laid out like a tree. That is the state “Loki” left things in when it ended, with Loki holding the branches together on his own.
The details in the TVA scene do not agree with each other, and that tells you how much weight a leak can carry. One report names the colliding worlds as Earth-10005 and Earth-1127. Another lists Earth-616, Earth-828 and Earth-10005 as the three realities left standing. Earth-10005 is the old Fox “X-Men” universe in both versions, and Earth-828 is home to the Fantastic Four. The numbers are almost certainly being read off blurry phone footage of a monitor. The shape of the scene is solid. The labels are not.
The Banner scene is the one that makes news for “Doomsday”. Mark Ruffalo’s Banner is sealed in a bunker two miles underground, some time after “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”. He tells the camera: “The Hulk is not getting out of here, and no one else is getting in.” Then the camera falls over, green sigils light up and a voice says: “Mr. Banner, I’m here to collect you.” It is Doom. Gizmodo reports that all three scenes play at every screening, not a rotating selection.
That matters because Ruffalo was not in the “Doomsday” cast. Marvel revealed that lineup one chair at a time in a livestream, and he was not among the names. Filmmaker Robert Meyer Burnett, who says he knows what is in the “Encore”, put it bluntly when asked whether the Hulk was being tricked: “He’s getting recruited.” If that holds, the Hulk goes into “Doomsday” on Doom’s side of the board, or at least in his custody.
There is a caveat on that as well. One report says the figure Doom meets may be a Hulk variant rather than our Banner. The bunker dialogue argues against it, because a variant would not be sitting in a bunker built after “Brand New Day”. But the recordings are rough, and the difference between Banner and a Banner from somewhere else is exactly the sort of thing a phone camera in a dark theater misses.
Step back and the “Encore” makes more sense than it did in June. A re-release of a six-year-old film with four new minutes sounded thin. AMC listed the new cut at three hours and five minutes against the original three hours and one, which is the same four minutes the phones captured. Marvel had also promised a recorded introduction from the Russos, and none of the leaks mention it, so it may be playing before the film rather than inside it. As a delivery system the whole thing is sharp. Every scene hands “Doomsday” something it needs: a reason for Steve and Peggy to be in play, a TVA already losing, and Doom holding the strongest Avenger. The catch is that audiences now know all of it two days early, from the worst possible copies.
Marvel’s problem is not the spoilers, which were always going to escape within a day of opening. It is that phone footage turned three scenes into guesswork about universe numbers and variants. The official versions arrive on Friday, and they should settle the arguments the leaks started. Until then, the Loki door, the TVA monitors and the Banner bunker are well sourced. Everything past that is someone’s reading of a blurry screen.
What Do You Think? Does Loki at Steve and Peggy’s door settle the branch-timeline argument, or just start a new one about the bench scene? Is a Hulk collected by Doom a prisoner, a recruit or a variant? And does leaking the whole “Encore” two days early hurt the re-release, or sell it?
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