When I was assigned a media trip to Iloilo in April 2019, my first concern was finding a local movie house.
The tour’s official agenda was to experience a property of a growing hotel chain in its hometown, including having a taste of the province’s rich offerings, from its treasure trove of culinary wonders to its captivating cultural stops and tourist spots. Exciting stuff, sure, especially for a first-time visitor, but the schedule happened to fall right smack of Avengers: Endgame’sopening day. I was locked in to watch and thought no amount of authentic, steamy batchoy in La Paz market could keep my mind off the epic conclusion of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)’s Infinity Saga.
It was serious business, to say the least. Since 2008, I tried to catch each one of MCU’s past 22 films on opening day, so it would almost feel unholy to miss Endgame-THE Endgame-on Day 1.
When I asked our tour organizer if I could excuse myself early from the welcome dinner, he instantly caught my drift. He knew that I was going to run to the cinemas because, apparently, he was an MCU fan, too. He got excited and asked to tag along, and we instantly felt a strong bond over catching some movie, despite only having met each other at the airport earlier that day.
And that’s how my first watch of Endgame went: In a far-away movie theater without the company of familiar people, I didn’t feel alone. There was a strong, beautiful, pulsating sense of camaraderie, where it felt like we were all as animated as we had ever been in a cinema. We all gasped audibly when a web-swinging Spider-Man fumbled the Infinity Gauntlet, and cheered with air fists when Tony Stark managed to steal the Infinity Stones in the nick of time from a surprised Thanos.
All these years later, we get a do-over of the experience with Avengers: Endgame Encore. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo labeled the extended cut, now showing in cinemas, as required viewing for Avengers: Doomsday, one of the most anticipated MCU movies in years that’s slated for this December. Critics, however, view the re-release as nothing more than a cynical cash grab for a title that’s already second on the all-time worldwide box office chart, with a gross of approximately $2.8 billion, next only to 2009’s Avatar.
Whatever the case may be, lines need to be drawn and expectations set for the Encore audience.
Are the four minutes of additional scenes intended to bridge the two Avengers films seven years apart worth the full ticket price on IMAX® and Infinity Vision-certified screens? Probably not, since those scenes are already-and unfortunately-uploaded online anyway, despite recent anti-spoiler pleas by the Russo brothers on their social media pages. That said, Avengers: Endgame Encore, in all its glorious three-plus-hour entirety, especially on today’s modern big screens, proves to be quite the visual spectacle and cinematic experience that’s well worth anyone’s time and money.
The difference lies in the intention. It’s best not to go into Avengers: Endgame Encore expecting it to be a full-blown, fleshed-out preview of Doomsday, because it’s not, despite the additional scenes. Rather, one should enjoy the ride for what it really is: an encore, a rerun of what for many was an unforgettable movie experience. Encore’s value lies in getting to relive that magic on the big screen once again, seven years later, seven years wiser, with a fresh perspective.
It’s almost poetic, then, that a major plot for Endgame is time travel. In Encore, it feels like there are two teams traversing time simultaneously. First, the heroes we see on screen, out to retrieve the Infinity Stones at different points in time. Second, is us watching them from our cinema seats all over again. Encore takes us back to the first time we saw Endgame, somehow reminding us what life was like in 2019, and how it has progressed since.
That includes the meteoric rise of AI in recent years that has made Tony Stark’s F.R.I.D.A.Y. less sci-fi and more ‘coming soon.’ Or how the emotional climax of Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther walking through the portal on Cap’s left means infinitely more, following the beloved actor’s demise, only a year after Endgame premiered.
From a personal standpoint, watching Encore brought me back to that Iloilo cinema, among a crowd of not-so-strangers. That media trip became one of the most memorable in my career, not because of the agenda, but because of that Avengers side quest, and I’m sure most of us have our own Endgame stories.
The Russo brothers acknowledged as much on their social media post, sharing a video of a crowd reaction at an Endgame premiere in a cinema they snuck in.
‘We stood in the back and watched a thousand strangers react-the gasps, the cheers, the tears. We got chills,’ they wrote in the caption. ‘Just so you know, we’ll be sneaking into theaters again for Avengers: Endgame Encore. There’s a generation that only ever saw this movie in their living room. And we want to hear what it sounds like when they finally get to see it in a theater.’