Avengers: Endgame Encore's New Post-Credits Scenes Completely Rewrite The Original

Updated  Nov 13, 2026, 10:00 AM EST

Simon Gallagher has worked in movie and TV journalism for more than 17 years. He has written more than 6000 articles and reviews, and edited thousands more. He is an expert in the entertainment industry, particularly in the golden age of screen superheroes. Simon is also a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic.
 

7 years ago, Avengers: Endgame changed everything for the MCU, bringing a close to the first era of Marvel's flagship movie franchise with the death of Tony Stark, the retirement of Steve Rogers, and the promise of a whole new saga to come. Over those years, the MCU has struggled to step out of the huge shadow cast by the Russos' colossal success, and we've now come full circle with the re-release of Avengers: Endgame Encore, complete with new footage. Avengers: Endgame Encore is now available to watch on Disney+.

Conventional wisdom suggests you shouldn't mess with something that's already beloved as a classic, but conventional wisdom never met George Lucas, and he took decades to stop tinkering with Star Wars. The Godfather Part III, Blade Runner, and Apocalypse Now also all released multiple director's cuts, definitive cuts, and other such variations. It might feel unthinkable, like da Vinci redoing the Mona Lisa's nose, but creators don't always agree with the finality of their own creations. Even when they say their art is supposed to act as a definitve full-stop, as the Russos did for Endgame.

Even before Encore's release, Avengers: Endgame's ending had actually been changed with the reveal of a secret epilogue revealed only in the much-maligned Secret Invasion that showed not only that Endgame's James Rhodes was an impostor (and the real one presumably had no idea his best friend was dead), but also that Nick Fury betrayed the Avengers by stealing their DNA immediately after the Battle of Earth. VisionQuest also changed Endgame, with the reveal of how Iron Man's AI, FRIDAY, experienced his death in a more intimate - and more tragic - way than any of his fellow heroes.

And now Avengers: Endgame Encore has added multiple new scenes, including more than one post-credits scene, and in doing so, have made a far different statement from the one they made when it first released in 2019. Crucially, they told Empire magazine that none of this was done just for the sake of it. It's all important. "Every inch of footage that you see has some relevance in some way. There are clues in every piece of that new footage that can lead you to a greater story in Doomsday."

How Many Post-Credits Scenes Avengers: Endgame Encore Has (& Why)

Despite the original version of Avengers: Endgame having no post-credits scene and breaking the MCU’s trend for the first time, Encore reverses that choice. Avengers: Endgame Encore has four new scenes that play out in the credits.

The Russos actually explained why Endgame had no credits scene back in 2019, during a Q&A session in Washington DC. Anthony Russo told the assembled crowd that it was a conscious creative decision that was intended as a statement in itself:

“The reason why there's no end credits is because our goal on this movie was simply to bring to a conclusion the 22 movies now that comprise the MCU for these 10 years of storytelling. I think one of the great creative upsides for Joe and I, as storytellers on this movie, was that this is the first MCU movie we got to tell where we weren't thinking about the future. We were simply thinking about the past, the journey that we've all been on together since that first Iron Man movie. And how do we bring the most epic sense of closure to that journey that we can possibly do. So that was our goal, and that was really why we had no tag.”

Obviously, things change. Well before Avengers: The Kang Dynasty became Avengers: Doomsday, and the Russos revealed their plans to make it a direct sequel to Endgame, Marvel retconned and changed Endgame’s ending multiple ways. The Russos may not have had a hand in that, but it was such a huge event that the shockwaves spread out far beyond the movie itself, and a return feels like fate.

At some point, the Russos decided that the journey was no longer over, and that sense of “closure” wasn’t quite as definite as they’d initially believed. When you have a line as loaded as “when you mess with time, it tends to mess back,” the door to explore those ramifications was always open.

The Russos spoke to Empire about the additional footage, and explained that the original Endgame set up what's going to happen in Avengers: Doomsday. Joe Russo confirmed that "there are clues in Endgame, things that are said, that will pay off in Doomsday. So if you want to go back and revisit the movie again – not the new footage but lines that are said in the movie – [there are some] that have an impact on Doomsday." This re-release was about underlining those moments, but obviously they weren't necessarily intended to pay off in this way.

They also addressed undoing the ending despite giving Chris Evans' Steve Rogers the "perfect" ending, as Anthony Russo himself called it, "We really thought about that ending [in Endgame] as the perfect ending for Steve Rogers. And the idea of just going one moment past that perfect ending, and thinking about how radically that moment can change by just taking one step past it… That was a big part of the delight in the new idea for what Doomsday is and where the story goes."

The fascination clearly lies in examining those moments through a different lens, and this new footage helps reframe it all. As Joe Russo told Empire, "I think part of the fun of coming back was, we thought, ‘Could we reach back to pull the story forward?’ And nobody's done that before. Nobody's ever had an opportunity to do it before. And this is a fluid universe, right? So you could do it in this universe, and it felt like an interesting way to start the story of Doomsday."

Avengers: Endgame Encore's New Credits Scenes Explained

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The first scene continues Steve and Peggy's dance, which is interrupted by a knock on the door. Peggy opens it, while Steve hides, to find Loki in his TVA uniform saying he has a way to help the couple. They inevitably look confused, but this would appear to be Loki intervening to protect them from the creation of an incursion, and leading them to an unknown sanctuary before Steve rejoins the fray later.

The second new Encore scene follows directly on from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and sees Bruce Banner holed up in his underground bunker, where he records a video diary entry about his research into suppressing the Hulk. He too is interrupted when an off-screen Doctor Doom arrives and mysteriously says, "Mr. Banner, I am here to collect you," before Hulk roars and they disappear. The Russos confirmed that Doom's "interest may extend beyond just Banner," suggesting Hulk is key to his plan.

That scene was given added importance when VisionQuest's ending revealed that Doom also went to Mount Wundagore to "collect" Wanda after Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness' ending. Clearly, Doom is building a team, as he tells Scarlet Witch that her power would be his.

The third scene takes us back to the TVA, where Owen Wilson's Mobius and Ke Huy Quan's OB are alerted to a number of universes crashing into one another, with an instant escalation causing outright panic, before OB proclaims that "the multiverse is collapsing." Anthony Russo told Empire that this scene offers "the unifying principle of combining the X-Men universe, the Avengers universe, the Fantastic Four universe. That is at the heart of the collision of these universes."

And the final, shortest scene is a stinger that replaces the original cut's audio clip of Tony Stark building the first Iron Man armor with shots of Doctor Doom forging his mask. This is arguably the most spiritually significant shot, but not the most narratively loaded, because of how much it changes Endgame's original sentiment.

Avengers: Endgame Encore Undoes The Original's Perfect Iron Man Tribute

With these new Avengers: Endgame Encore post-credits scenes added, the Russos added a subtle cost that completely changes the very last moments of the original cut. Endgame originally ended with the clanging sounds as a touching and important tribute to Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark. That tribute was a full-circle moment, acknowledging both the end and the start of Stark's journey, and subtly celebrating his status as the founding stone of the entire MCU. Remember, there were no wider plans for such a sprawling franchise when John Favreau's movie came out, and without Robert Downey Jr. and the quality of that release, we wouldn't be talking about it as an ongoing franchise now.

But in changing that scene and adding in Endgame's missing post-credits scenes, the Russos removed the quiet reverence of that decision. Reversing the choice to look to the future, which Endgame's original ending did, is a conscious statement: this is, after all, a re-release designed very much as a precursor to Avengers: Doomsday's release at the end of the year. That's exciting, but the tribute sadly no longer carries the same weight.

Avengers: Endgame Encore releases in theaters worldwide on September 25. The original version is streaming now on Disney+.

Avengers: Endgame