About time: Marvel finally owns up to what went wrong with the Multiverse Saga

The MCU has wheeled out Avengers Endgame: Encore, an extended cut of its biggest film, supposedly to bridge the old Infinity Saga with the current Multiverse mess. They're selling it as a clever masterplan, but give it a proper look and all you see is Marvel admitting, finally, where things have gone wonky. We’re getting four new post-credits scenes to set up Avengers: Doomsday (out 18 December 2026), but the whole exercise reeks of Marvel trying to fix problems with duct tape once the walls have already caved in.

Avengers Endgame: Encore uses four extra post-credits scenes to set up Avengers: Doomsday, hitting cinemas in December 2026.

Trying to Patch the Cracks

Let’s start with the obvious: these new Endgame bits are meant to plant seeds that, frankly, should’ve been popping up in the Multiverse Saga all along. Despite a smattering of hints in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, most of the groundwork for Doctor Doom (yes, now played by Robert Downey Jr., no, you didn’t misread that) comes from trailers and this newly attached Encore footage. It's all very last minute. Feels like the studio realised at the eleventh hour that they’d spent three phases running in circles and now needed a Big Bad pronto.

To be slightly fair, this wasn’t the original blueprint. The whole arc was meant to revolve around Kang the Conqueror until Marvel dropped Jonathan Majors after his well-publicised assault and harassment conviction in 2024. Suddenly Doctor Doom had to be shoved front and centre, and the rushed pivot hasn't helped.

Think about how they handled Thanos: years of build-up, post-credits teases, behind-the-scenes meddling. The bloke was puppet-mastering Loki in the first Avengers film, had family dramas in Guardians of the Galaxy, and generally felt like a real, looming threat. By the time he finally showed up punching people into the floor, we knew what he wanted and why we ought to worry.

Doctor Doom, by contrast, pops up in a single post-credits tag after First Steps and is sprinkled across teaser trailers. We’re told he blames the Avengers for things they 'stole', apparently resents them, and wants to reshape the multiverse — but it’s all hand-wavy and not nearly concrete enough. The fact that Marvel’s asking us to pretend Endgame was always tied to Doom is almost comical; it only draws more attention to how absent he’s been for most of this saga.

It’s All About the Old Guard (Still)

The other thing blindingly obvious in this Encore release: Marvel still can’t let go of its old toys. Instead of properly introducing the next generation, the Multiverse Saga keeps banking on the crowd-pleasers from years back. So not only is Downey Jr back, now with a metal mask instead of an Iron one, but the Encore cut also ropes in Chris Evans (Steve Rogers), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner), and, if trailers aren’t lying, Chris Hemsworth (Thor) for a starring role in Doomsday.

No one’s mad about seeing these faces, but it starts to look more desperate than triumphant, especially as their returns stomp all over their previous, pretty perfect send-offs. Loki had his big ending already; Steve Rogers literally exited the narrative ages ago. Instead of handing on the baton, the Encore footage makes it look like these four are back to do the heavy lifting themselves: Steve’s decisions will apparently drive Doomsday, Doom wants to exploit the Hulk, and Loki and Thor are key to stopping the threat. It’s as if Marvel’s fix for the Multiverse Saga’s ailing story threads is just to dig up what worked before and hope no one can tell the difference — even though the newer batch of heroes is, once again, left on the bench.

Where’s the New Blood?

For all the supposed effort to tie these films together, the Multiverse Saga still struggles to make its new heroes matter. Most of them feel like temporary side projects rather than an interconnected universe. Even Shang-Chi, finally showing his face again in Doomsday, hasn’t had a sniff of screen time since his debut back in 2021. That’s more than you can say for most of his peers: Eternals? Missing. She-Hulk? No word. Moon Knight? AWOL.

• Shang-Chi is coming back for Doomsday, but hasn’t appeared since 2021
• No sign of Eternals, She-Hulk, or Moon Knight in the mainline Avengers story
• Anthony Mackie’s Captain America is still without a proper Avengers lineup or focus
• Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four remain largely isolated from the bigger plot

Compare that to the old days: by this point before Endgame, the Avengers had been fighting baddies together across several films. Every solo outing felt tied into something bigger. Even where Multiverse Saga plot points do line up — Doctor Strange’s detours, Spidey’s multiversal mess — it’s all rather arm’s-length and easy to forget. Now the plan seems to be making Endgame retroactively crucial, rather than actually moving forward.