Marvel just found the cleanest way to make you pay for a trailer: put it in front of the highest-grossing team-up movie ever made and call it an encore.

At Marvel Studios’ Hall H panel on July 25, Kevin Feige confirmed that Avengers: Endgame is heading back to theaters on September 25 under the banner Avengers: Endgame Encore — and it isn’t just a straight reprint. Before Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters in December, fans can revisit the record-breaking Avengers: Endgame, returning to theaters beginning September 25, and Feige announced the re-release will feature brand-new footage setting the stage for what’s to come in Doomsday.

Feige’s framing on stage was pure nostalgia bait: “The world’s a different place. But reminding all of us what it was like to be in that theater, cheering along and enjoying that crazy enthusiasm, is why we’re rereleasing Avengers: Endgame on September 25.”

The Doomsday Bait-and-Switch

Here’s the actual hook: the “Encore” trailer shown to the Hall H crowd was all old footage, but with the logo reading ENDGAME ENCORE — no “Avengers” — before Feige said it will have exclusive footage from Doomsday. That’s the play. Get you back in for a movie you already own on 4K, then dangle first-look footage from the December tentpole as the real product.

And that footage wasn’t nothing. One line is doing a lot of work: the trailer includes shots of Steve Rogers’ journey returning the Infinity Stones, with heavy emphasis on Tony Stark’s line, “You mess with time, it tends to mess back.” Pair that with the actual Doomsday clip shown at the panel — Sue Storm describing Victor von Doom and saying she didn’t know how broken he truly was, while Doom says the people who have lived stolen lives must now give them back — and Marvel is openly wiring the timeline mechanics of Endgame directly into Robert Downey Jr.’s villain turn as Doctor Doom.

Why Theaters, Why Now

This isn’t charity. Marvel Studios is re-releasing Avengers: Endgame in theaters on September 25, giving audiences one more chance to relive the pop-culture event, and this time they might aim to retake the “highest-grossing movie of all time” title from Avatar. That’s the quiet part of the pitch: Endgame shattered box office records with the biggest opening weekend of all time at $1.2 billion globally, and stands as the second-highest grossing film of all time domestically and globally with a $2.799 billion total. A modest re-release bump is a real shot at reclaiming a record Marvel has chased for years.

It also lands three months before the movie it’s actually advertising. The Avengers: Endgame re-release comes before the highly anticipated Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters on December 18, 2026. Same Russo brothers directing both. Same architecture — get the emotional muscle memory of the Infinity Saga’s ending warmed up right before the guy who used to play its hero shows up wearing the mask of its next villain.

So here’s the actual question worth arguing about: is putting new footage inside a six-year-old blockbuster smart counter-programming against streaming fatigue — or is Marvel just admitting it doesn’t trust a stand-alone trailer drop to do the job anymore?