Endgame won the weekend seven years late and its famous last scene now has Loki in it
Avengers: Endgame won the American box office this weekend, seven years late. What Disney added is about four minutes: a changed ending that puts Loki in the Steve and Peggy dance, and three post-credits scenes that do most of the setup work for Doomsday.
Avengers: Endgame Encore took $26 million from 3,060 theatres over the weekend and finished first, ahead of three brand-new wide releases. Nobody shot a film for that. Disney added roughly four minutes to something released in April 2019 and put it back in cinemas.
The four minutes are worth going through, because they are not bonus material. They are the first act of a film that opens on 18 December.
The ending has been changed, and it is the ending people care about
The last scene of Endgame — Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter dancing in a living room, alone, finally — is now interrupted. Loki arrives at the door. Steve comes out of hiding. Loki, who has reorganised the Time Variance Authority in the years since, offers to help them both.
Whatever you think of that, it is a studio going back into the most-discussed final shot of its most successful film and putting a character in the room. The scene now reaches forward into the Disney+ Loki series rather than closing a story.
Three post-credits scenes, in order
- Doom collects the Hulk. Bruce Banner is underground, confined, live-blogging about a gamma treatment. Doctor Doom's voice announces he has come to collect him. The Hulk transforms, both leave, and green markings are left behind on the walls.
- Doom forges his mask. The original film's closing audio — the clang of Tony Stark building the first Iron Man armour — returns, this time over images of Doom hammering metal into a face. The parallel is not subtle and is not meant to be.
- The TVA finds an incursion. Mobius and colleagues discover Earth-10005 and Earth-1127 colliding. Casey reports roughly three thousand similar events happening at once. OB concludes the multiverse is collapsing.
Earth-10005 is the designation long used for Fox's X-Men films, which matters given that Doomsday's announced cast includes Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. The mechanism by which those actors arrive in a Marvel Studios film is now on screen, in a re-release, three months early.
A trailer that sold $26 million of tickets
Strip the sentiment out and this is what the weekend was: Disney charged full price for promotional material and it outgrossed Paramount's Brad Pitt survival thriller, A24's most expensive wide release and a DreamWorks animated feature.
The premium screens helped. IMAX and Disney's Infinity Vision presentations carried additional Doomsday footage not included in standard showings, which turns the format upgrade into a content upgrade — a different proposition from the usual bigger-screen pitch.
What is still unknown
How much of this footage is final. Post-credits scenes have been reshot between a tease and the film it teases before, and Doomsday was still doing additional photography in early 2026.
What the three thousand incursions actually mean for the plot, as opposed to for the marketing. And whether any of it survives the eight weeks between now and 18 December, a stretch in which Marvel has historically changed a great deal.
The most famous closing shot in the franchise is now a doorbell. Whether that is a betrayal or the point depends entirely on whether you think Endgame ever ended.