Marvel can build a decade-long cinematic universe, coordinate two dozen actors' schedules across three continents, and keep Doctor Doom's face hidden for the better part of a year. What it apparently cannot do is stop footage from leaking a few days before release. Clips said to be from Avengers: Endgame Encore, the retooled re-release of the 2019 blockbuster, have been making the rounds online, and fans are once again doing the thing Marvel has begged them not to do since 2019: spoiling it for each other.
The re-release hits Indian theaters (and everywhere else) on September 25, screening in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Avengers: Doomsday, the film all this footage is supposedly building toward, doesn't arrive until December 18.
Here's where it gets messy, because nobody official is confirming anything. Reports pointing to the new footage have circled around a handful of specific beats for weeks now. One is a scene at Tony Stark's funeral where Steve Rogers talks with Ant-Man about the mechanics of the time heist. Another involves Loki, seen in a stretch of footage from his earlier, unseen stint working inside the Time Variance Authority, before any of that became a Disney+ show.
Then there's the Hulk and Doctor Doom of it all. Robert Meyer Burnett, a filmmaker and editor with real industry connections, posted on X that while he hadn't personally seen a leaked copy, he'd heard from people who had that Hulk and Doctor Doom share a scene somewhere in Encore. That's a strange pairing on paper. Bruce Banner hasn't crossed paths with Victor von Doom in any confirmed MCU material, so if it's real, it's presumably meant to plant a seed for Doomsday rather than pay off anything on its own.
Marvel hasn't said a word about any of this. No statement, no takedown notices publicized, nothing. Which, fittingly, is exactly what happened back in 2019 too.
Marvel's relationship with Endgame leaks has always been rocky. Days before the original 2019 release, a chunk of footage hit Reddit and Twitter, and within an hour it had spread far enough that the studio couldn't do much besides ask people nicely to stay off social media. The Russo brothers wrote an open letter. #DontSpoilTheEndgame trended. None of it undid the leak; it just gave people a hashtag to feel bad about ignoring.
Seven years later, the pattern's repeating itself, just with smaller stakes. This time it's four extra minutes of connective tissue, not a three-hour movie nobody had seen yet. Encore's official runtime lands at 185 minutes, per AMC Theatres' listing, four minutes past the 2019 cut's 181. Reports out of Cosmic Book News put it more precisely: standard screenings get under two minutes of new material, while IMAX and the new Infinity Vision format carry closer to five, including a fresh intro and an end tag exclusive to those bigger formats.
Complicating things further, a separate and much bigger claim has been floating around X: that Avengers: Doomsday itself, the entire film, has leaked online in 4K. Marvel has stayed silent on that one too, and it's worth treating with real skepticism. Fandom has a long track record of AI-generated fakes getting passed around as leaked footage lately, including one widely shared clip supposedly showing Doctor Doom fighting Scarlet Witch that turned out, on closer inspection, to be entirely AI-generated.
So take the Encore leaks with a grain of salt, and the Doomsday-leaked-in-full claim with a much bigger one.
If the pattern from 2019 holds, expect platforms to start yanking clips for copyright violations within a day or two, expect Marvel to say nothing publicly, and expect ticket sales for Encore to be completely unbothered by any of it. Endgame made nearly $2.8 billion the first time around. A handful of blurry clips of Loki filing TVA paperwork isn't going to keep anyone home.
Encore opens Thursday. Doomsday is still three months out.
