Endgame Encore re-release, September 25: the Doomsday footage depends on which ticket you buy

Avengers: Endgame returns to theaters this Friday, September 25, rebranded as Avengers Endgame: Encore — and the actual product being sold is not the 2019 movie you've seen eleven times. It's the footage from Avengers: Doomsday (December 18) stapled to it, and Marvel has sliced that footage into tiers like an airline boarding process.

Here's the seating chart:

• Any Encore ticket: the movie, plus an exclusive look at Doomsday — new material on a big screen months before any trailer hits your phone.
• IMAX and "Infinity Vision" tickets: all of the above plus an additional sneak peek that standard auditoriums don't get — Disney's CineEurope pitch spelled out the premium package as "a custom introduction, additional new footage, and a special end tag."
• The result: a re-release that runs roughly four minutes longer than the original three-hour cut, where the length of your glimpse at the MCU's future is a function of your screen's square footage.

Wait, what is Infinity Vision

Glad you asked, because teaching you the term is the entire point of this exercise. Infinity Vision is Disney's brand-new certification for premium large-format screens — at least 45 feet wide, Dolby 7.1, minimum brightness specs — promising, per Marvel's own copy, "big screens, bright images, and outstanding sound." It exists because of a December problem: Doomsday opens the same day as Dune: Part Three, and Dune has IMAX's screens locked up for three weeks. Disney needs audiences trained to see a different premium badge as equivalent by then, and a guaranteed-sellout re-release with ransom footage is the training program.

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IMAX, which happily runs Encore this weekend since there's no December conflict yet, is not pretending otherwise — CFO Natasha Fernandes dismissed the rival format as

"a marketing play."

The footage tiering is the tell. Nobody at Disney thinks you need to rewatch Endgame; they think you'll pay premium prices for four minutes of Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom. They are almost certainly right.

What's actually in the footage remains officially unconfirmed — the Russos have only said it sits inside the Doomsday story and bridges the two films. The D23 material shown in August has never been released publicly, which leaves Friday's premium screens as the only legal way to see new Doomsday before Christmas.

Previously we wrote: Forgotten Island reviews hit 100% on Rotten Tomatoes: DreamWorks' release date lands this week — and it isn't a sequel to anything