Marvel Studios has just announced it’s bringing the 2019 MCU finale Avengers: Endgame back to theaters next year.
“Avengers: Endgame — Back in theaters, September 2026,” Marvel Studios announced on X on Friday. It’s accompanied by a short video that begins with a black screen before Anthony Mackie’s iconic “on your left” line plays, revealing the Avengers: Endgame logo to what is presumably a recording of a theater audience’s hoots and hollers. “Avengers, assemble,” Chris Evans’ Captain America says, accompanied by more screaming.
We have reached the stage in pop culture where we are nostalgic for something that happened six years ago.
Avengers: Endgame — Back in theaters, September 2026. pic.twitter.com/PRmW9pEAxm
— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) December 5, 2025
(Hilariously, an account called the Official Chicken Little Movie Account posted the entirety of Avengers: Endgame as a reply to the announcement.)
Maybe this is a sign of how badly the COVID pandemic damaged our cultural psyche, but it’s more likely Marvel is trying to bring back some goodwill ahead of the release of Avengers: Doomsday next December. Doomsday, part of the Avengers series that first kicked off in 2012, is also considered a part of the “Multiverse Saga,” which plays on the franchise’s recent focus on time travel and alternate realities (we’ve seen it play out in films like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home).
Thanks to the multiverse’s rule-bending logic, Doomsday will star Robert Downey Jr., who played Iron Man in the first four Avengers films, but returns this time as Doctor Doom. It will also feature a massive, frankly absurd ensemble cast drawn in part from more than two decades of comic book movies. The roster is split into what appears to be teams, if this post claiming to showcase a video of a recent Disney Italia presentation is to be believed.
Disney Italia presented ‘AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY’ at a conference in Sorrento
(via https://t.co/My30rheaoK)#avengersdoomsday pic.twitter.com/mRwzyOYM9z
— Nerd Al Quadrato (@nerdalquadrato) December 2, 2025
The “teams” include actors from the original MCU flicks (Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Tom Hiddleston as Loki), the aughts X-Men movies (Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Rebecca Romijn as Mystique), the Fantastic Four reboot (Pedro Pascal as Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm), and the Thunderbolts crew AKA The New Avengers (Sebastian Stan as Winter Soldier, Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova).
If Doomsday sticks to its December 2026 release date, it’ll hit theaters more than seven years after Endgame. Normally, you could argue Marvel is worried fans will have forgotten what’s going on, but nearly every movie released since 2019 has somehow tied into the larger MCU picture. Plus, Endgame was the end of many core Avengers’ stories, while Doomsday seems to be picking up threads from a menagerie of Marvel films.
The cynic in me thinks this is an attempt to recreate the magic that took place when Endgame released all those years ago, and bad people recording in the movie theater with their phones gave us real-time audience reactions to the return of the Thanos-snapped heroes and Captain America wielding Thor’s hammer. (If you consider that a spoiler, you must have been trapped in ice for the last half-decade.) The screams, the cheers, the exclamations of surprise—aside from the most recent Spider-Man flick bringing back Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield to stand alongside Tom Holland in Spidey suits, Marvel hasn’t gotten a crowd pop like that since.
There have been some serious stinkers since Endgame, including Eternals, Captain America: Brave New World, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Maybe Marvel hopes we’ll all step into a time machine and transport us back to a pre-COVID era when superhero movies could still stir something in our hearts. Nostalgia, remember, is a helluva drug.
