Stark warning – does new footage in Avengers: Endgame reveal the truth about Doctor Doom?

Does it really matter which film is the highest-grossing of all time at the global box office? Will James Cameron be lying awake at night staring into the darkness and pondering whether to withdraw humanity’s access to giant, blue-skinned space elves out of sheer spite, just because Avatar has been dethroned once again by Avengers: Endgame? It seems unlikely. Are the Russo brothers at this very moment leaping and capering with wild abandon because adding a few new scenes and releasing their film for the umpteenth time has led to this momentous changing of the guard? Probably not. Is a Disney accountant somewhere holding a tiny awards ceremony in which every nominee is himself? Well yes, absolutely, because the mouse house ultimately owns both films.

And yet the most interesting thing about Avengers: Endgame’s return to cinemas is not how much money it has made – for the record, the rerelease, titled Avengers Endgame: Encore, had brought in another $126m worldwide by last weekend, taking its lifetime total to approximately $2.925bn (just ahead of Avatar’s $2.923bn) – but what Marvel added to the picture while we were all busy counting.

Premium-format presentations of the new version feature a new scene at the end of the film and another three during and after its credits, with some also appearing in standard screenings. The idea is presumably that these tantalising snippets will segue viewers smoothly into the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday with the sort of spring in the step that can only come from being convinced that they are now three tiny clues away from understanding the mind of Kevin Feige.

‘I’ve got to do what now?’ … Mark Ruffalo as Hulk in Avengers Endgame: Encore. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy

The original Endgame featured a closing shot of Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, who has apparently used Tony Stark’s discovery of time travel to return to the 1940s, dancing contentedly with Hayley Atwell’s Peggy Carter. In the new version, the couple are interrupted by a knock at the door, only to find Tom Hiddleston’s Loki standing outside offering to help them. Given that the Norse trickster ended Loki season two holding the branching timelines of the multiverse together, this is unlikely to be just a neighbour popping round to complain about the hedge. We are presumably meant to infer that whatever is about to go wrong with reality is serious enough to reach Steve even in his carefully arranged retirement, and that his happy ending may now have to be put on hold. The man has defeated the Nazis and helped reverse the extinction of half of all life, but apparently still hasn’t accrued enough annual leave to finish a dance.

Scene two turns up during the credits, and finds Bruce Banner holed up in an underground facility following the events of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, trying to keep his inner Hulk under control. As if matters couldn’t get any worse, the voice of Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom is heard announcing that he has come to “collect” the troubled scientist. Whether he wants Banner’s genius, the Hulk’s muscle or something considerably less agreeable remains unclear, but it seems safe to assume he is not putting together a pub quiz team.

A second mid-credits scene sees the Time Variance Authority’s Mobius (Owen Wilson), OB (Ke Huy Quan) and Casey (Eugene Cordero) – whose organisation is tasked, following the events of Loki season two, with protecting the branching timelines it once ruthlessly pruned – watching in horror as universes collide and vanish in their thousands. Crucially, the reality inhabited by the X-Men during the 20th Century Fox era is among those that are threatened. In the comics, similar incursions unfold through Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers, culminating in the Time Runs Out storyline and leading into the 2015 event Secret Wars. The main Marvel and Ultimate universes are the last to be destroyed, after which Doctor Doom assembles remnants of ruined realities into the patchwork planet Battleworld. Might Doomsday see the Fox universe, the retro-futuristic reality occupied by the Fantastic Four and the main Marvel Cinematic Universe similarly stitched together, with Doom appointing himself ruler of whatever survives?

Gonna need a bigger hammer … Chris Hemsworth as Thor in Avengers Endgame: Encore. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy

Encore’s final scene arrives after the credits, and reworks Endgame’s original audio farewell: Tony Stark building his first Iron Man armour in an Afghan cave. The new version pairs the blows of the hammer with flashing images, culminating in a final, ominous shot of Doctor Doom’s mask. Is Marvel trying to tell us that the Latverian sorcerer really is a Stark variant after all? Or is the studio just exploiting the unsettling associations of a familiar din coming from the wrong metal visage? Either way, the film-makers clearly want us to carry the memory of Tony Stark into Doomsday, and perhaps ponder how much of the man who saved the universe might lurk inside the one now threatening it.

This is, admittedly, a more intriguing setup than we might expect from a common-or-garden Marvel mashup. If Doom has the face of a lost friend and the power to offer ravaged worlds the merest glimpse of a future beyond torture and oblivion, resisting him could require more than Thor locating a larger hammer than usual.

What is clear is that Marvel has somehow persuaded audiences to pay again for a film they already know, then rewarded them with the news that retirement is cancelled, the Hulk’s attempts to retreat from public life have failed and existence itself is falling apart. Somewhere, that Disney accountant is probably giving himself a lifetime achievement award.