Avengers: Endgame Review: A Near-Perfect Goodbye Back for the 2026 Encore

Yes, Avengers: Endgame is worth watching, and the 2026 encore edition is the best excuse in seven years to put it back on a cinema screen. The verdict belongs to the 2019 film by Anthony and Joe Russo. Marvel is running it again as Avengers Endgame Encore from September 25, 2026, with new material attached and roughly four extra minutes of running time. The cut underneath has not been retooled, so the criticism of the film itself still applies exactly as it did in 2019.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it, and catch the encore edition if a cinema sits near you. An 181-minute finale that earns most of its length, carried by Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. Rotten Tomatoes has the 2019 film at 94 percent from 553 critic reviews. Metacritic has it at 78 from 57 critic reviews, which tells you where the argument sits. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Avengers: Endgame is about

The film picks up where Infinity War left the world. Carol Danvers pulls a drifting Tony Stark and Nebula out of deep space, and the survivors find Thanos on an empty planet and kill him, only to learn he destroyed the Stones. Five years later Scott Lang climbs out of the Quantum Realm, having experienced five hours of a five-year sentence, and the remaining Avengers work out that time travel can bring the Stones back.

What follows is a heist plot spread across five eras. Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff go to Vormir for the Soul Stone, where the price is a loved one. Tony and Steve take the Time Stone in 2012 and the Space Stone in 1970. Rocket and an unusually cheerful Thor dig the Reality Stone out of Jane Foster's lap in Asgard. The whole enterprise is a machine for handing each of them a moment of grief they already know the shape of, and the film runs most of its 181 minutes on that fuel.

Cast and performances

The performances are the reason the film still lands. Brian Tallerico wrote at RogerEbert.com that Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. "have turned Captain America and Iron Man into something larger than life for a generation." Evans plays Steve Rogers as a tired man holding a job he no longer believes in, and the film is smart enough to make the tiredness the point rather than the weakness.

Jeremy Renner gets the rawest material in the film, with Clint Barton opening the movie on the night the Snap takes his family and then taking up street fighting with petty criminals, before he and Natasha Romanoff stand on a cliff at Vormir where one of them has to die to get the Stone. Chris Hemsworth plays Thor as a bereaved man who has eaten himself into a shape he cannot get out of, and Hemsworth makes the grief funny without letting you off the hook for it. Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner is a professor giving a TED talk on the day the world ends, and Paul Rudd plays Scott Lang with a loose, distracted energy that keeps the science from turning into homework.

What works

The first hour, when nobody is in a suit. The opening moves from a compound reunion into a funeral, and it lets characters sit in a room with each other before it needs them. Tallerico credited the screenplay, by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, with the change in the film's posture: "one feels, for arguably the first time, a sense of looking back instead of merely trying to set the table for something to come." The colour-coded time travel suits are a cheap joke that lands because the grief underneath them is played straight. David Sims at The Atlantic made the same point from the other side, noting that the film "earns its length not by overstuffing the frame with opulent action, but by slowing things down and basking in the charisma of its ensemble."

The intimacy of the smaller stuff. Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian put the film's priorities in a line: the catharsis in the final battle "arises from prioritising character development over plot and spectacle". He also singled out Thor's new life in New Asgard, where a bereaved king has put on an enormous amount of weight and become morosely obsessed with beer and video games, and where a line about Mungo Jerry gets one of the biggest laughs of the film. The picture is at its best in those rooms, and it knows it.

What doesn't

The engineering. Tallerico's complaint is the sharpest version of it, and it is about craft rather than taste: "The result is a film that often feels more like a product than a piece of art." He wanted "one of the pregnant pauses about the seriousness of the situation" to lead somewhere that felt spontaneous. The middle hour delivers a lot of spectacle that is very precisely calibrated and never quite wobbles.

The returning characters inherit their heroism back rather than earning it in the moment. Three hours is long enough for that to be noticeable, and Peter Bradshaw put it as: "Sceptics might feel assailed by the 181-minute running time; a three-hour movie is the ultimate act of fan service." The runtime is not the problem on its own. The problem is that the second half is a series of set pieces joined by scenes of people saying goodbye.

The 2026 Encore edition

The Encore edition is a re-release with a purpose. Box Office Mojo records the 2026 run as a 47-market release between September 23 and September 25, 2026, and Popped reported on August 27, 2026 that the listed runtime has moved from the original 181 minutes to about 185 minutes, with additional material created as Marvel moves toward Avengers: Doomsday, which opens December 18, 2026. Marvel is also selling a further Doomsday preview at selected IMAX and Infinity Vision screenings, and the Encore edition is one of the first major releases to carry the new Infinity Vision certification.

None of that changes the film being reviewed here. The extra minutes are a bridge to a sequel, not a revision of the 2019 story, and anyone deciding whether to spend three hours in a cinema should judge the 181-minute cut that the critics saw. Box Office Mojo's figures, read on October 21, 2026, split the money by run. The PG-13, 181-minute original ran in 57 markets from April 24 to April 29, 2019 and took $2,799,439,100 worldwide. The encore ran from September 23 to September 25, 2026 and took $141,892,440, which took the film's lifetime total to $2,941,331,540 and made it the highest-grossing film of all time again.

What audiences say

Every number below was checked on October 21, 2026, and every one of them is the 2019 film's record. The encore is the same film, so there is no separate 2026 score to cite.

Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 94 percent from 553 critic reviews, with a 96 percent Popcornmeter from more than 2,500 verified ratings. Metacritic has a Metascore of 78 from 57 critic reviews, labelled Generally Favorable, plus a user score of 8.3 from 5,786 user ratings. IMDb has it at 8.4 out of 10 from 1.5 million ratings. Letterboxd's member average is a weighted 4.03 from 4,180,355 ratings, with 495,274 written reviews and 68,000 fans following the film. TMDB has it at 8.2 from 29,050 votes.

The gap between the 94 and the 78 is the whole argument. The 553 critics on Rotten Tomatoes and the audiences treated the finale as a shared event. The 57 critics on Metacritic treated it as a machine with a moving part where a soul should be.

Where to watch Avengers: Endgame

Disney Plus carries it in the United States, and JustWatch, which checked 376 streaming services on October 20, 2026, also lists it for rent on Amazon Video and the Apple TV Store and for purchase on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home. TMDB also lists Google Play Movies and YouTube for rental, and Letterboxd carries Google Play Movies as well. It is on disc as well, and the US certificate is PG-13 for a 3 hour 1 minute run.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Avengers: Endgame streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Avengers: Endgame worth watching? Yes, with one condition. Go to a cinema for the encore if you can, because the film was built for a room with strangers in it and the Encore edition gives you a reason to go on release night. The 2019 cut is a near-perfect goodbye that is held together by craft rather than by human mess, and anyone who has outgrown the franchise will find the seams faster than the fans will. The ending, and what it costs, is in the gate below.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Avengers: Endgame

Three weeks after the snap, Carol Danvers rescues Tony Stark and Nebula from deep space, and the remaining Avengers track Thanos to an uninhabited planet. Thor decapitates him. The Stones are gone.

Five years on, Scott Lang escapes the Quantum Realm and tells the Avengers that he lived five hours while everyone else lived five years. They build a time machine, and the team goes out for the Stones. Banner and Rocket take the Reality Stone from Jane Foster in 2013. Barton and Romanoff go to Vormir, where the Soul Stone can only be taken by sacrificing someone you love, and Romanoff goes over the edge. Rogers and Stark travel to 2012 and 1970 for the Mind, Time and Space Stones, and Rogers sees Peggy Carter one last time.

Nebula's cybernetics link her to her 2014 self, and past Thanos comes forward with his warship. He destroys the compound, summons his army and takes the gauntlet. The restored Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Wakanda and Asgard meet him on the field, and Captain Marvel tears his ship apart, but he overpowers her. Tony steals the Stones, snaps his fingers, and Thanos and his army disintegrate. Tony dies.

After Stark's funeral, Thor appoints Valkyrie as queen of New Asgard and leaves with the Guardians. Rogers returns the Stones and Mjolnir to their own timelines and stays in the past with Carter. In the present, an elderly Rogers hands his shield to Sam Wilson.