Several Iconic Battle of Earth Shots Have Been Recolored for Avengers Endgame Encore

Avengers: Endgame Encore is coming September 25th, and the new trailer promises an exclusive look at Avengers: Doomsday alongside several iconic shots from the 2019 film that, if you look closely, have been recolored and brightened. I want to break down why Marvel is using these Endgame shots to build excitement for Doomsday and this Encore event, walk through some details you might have missed in the edit, and explain why the coloring looks the way it now does.

The extra four minutes could hide a new Doctor Doom post credit scene

Endgame Encore is reportedly going to run 3 hours and 5 minutes, which is 4 minutes longer than Endgame's original 3 hour and 1 minute run time back in 2019. That means we can expect roughly 4 extra minutes of bonus footage tied to whatever they are showing for Doomsday, whether that is a short new scene or a sizzle reel that amounts to a trailer.

I have been suspecting it is going to be a new post credit scene to Endgame that builds on the Iron Man hammering sound effect that originally played over Endgame's credits, reinterpreted now as Victor Von Doom hammering his armor together in the Doomstadt armory. I do not know if that will end up being the opening scene of Avengers: Doomsday, but I think it is going to be a particular scene we see somewhere in the first act of the film.

The trailer walks through the Battle of Earth's most iconic shots

The Encore trailer opens on Captain America tightening his broken shield onto his wounded arm as he faces Thanos alone, but the audio underneath it is Sam Wilson returning from the blip: "Hey Cap, you read me? Cap, it's Sam. Can you hear me?" From there it cut to footage from the opening night screenings held on April 26th, 2019, when audiences were shown losing their minds at the portals moment, including someone recording it on their phone.

• Iron Man landing to face Thanos before the battle breaks out
• Thor summoning Stormbreaker, and Peter Parker arriving through the portal in the Iron Spider suit
• Cap lining up with the returning heroes, catching Mjolnir, then Thanos raising his Uru sword with his forces behind him before Cap says "Avengers, assemble!"
• The Benatar floating in space with an emaciated Tony inside, then his Iron Man helmet recording his goodbye message to Pepper
• The time heist planning session moment where everyone looks at the camera, and the group stepping onto the quantum tunnel platform in their time suits
• The Benatar jumping from Morag to Vormir after Clint and Natasha drop off Rhodey and Nebula, and an earlier shot of Carol Danvers joining the Avengers without Tony to hunt Thanos
• Clint holding Natasha's hand on Vormir before his sacrifice jump, and the Ancient One pushing Bruce Banner's soul onto the astral plane
• Tony Stark in Camp Lehigh in 1970 retrieving the Tesseract, and Cap fighting his 2012 self in Avengers Tower, played by stunt performer and Extraction director Sam Hargrave
• The Avengers compound being bombed by Thanos's Sanctuary 2, and Nebula and Gamora watching 2014 Thanos arrive
• Steve Rogers on the new quantum tunnel platform with the six stones and the 2013 Mjolnir, ready to return everything, as Sam and Bucky watch
• Smart Hulk wearing the nano gauntlet to snap everyone back, and Thor holding both Stormbreaker and Mjolnir as the three step forward to face 2014 Thanos
• Carol Danvers on the compound lawn after bringing Tony and Nebula home, and Wanda fighting Thanos one on one, telling him "You took everything from me," to which he replies "I don't know who you are"
• Nebula retrieving the orb on Morag, Rocket on War Machine's shoulder as Giant Man appears behind them, and Loki grabbing the Tesseract to escape during the heist
• Clint and Natasha pressing their heads together before the Vormir cliff jump, and Tony Stark snapping the stones after saying "I am Iron Man"

A single changed line reframes Tony Stark's warning as being about Doom, not Kang

Right after Thanos bombs the Avengers compound in the 2019 film, Tony says, "You mess with time, it tends to mess back." In the new Encore trailer, the line has been changed to, "You mess with time, time tends to mess back." It is subtle, but it is different, and I wonder whether Robert Downey Jr. recorded a new take, or whether they just pulled another take from the 2019 ADR sessions. I also wonder if a flashback to this exact moment gets included somewhere in Doomsday.

In the context of the original scene, Tony was talking about the unforeseen consequences of 2014 Thanos coming from the past to bomb their present. But more broadly it also hints at other consequences of the time heist that the Avengers did not know about yet, the unknown unknowns. Back in 2022 that line could have pointed toward Kang the Conqueror. Now, in this version of the multiverse saga built around Doctor Doom, I think we are going to revisit it in Doomsday and realize Tony's words were actually a warning about Doom, with the character Downey plays predicting the arrival of another character Downey now plays.

Steve Rogers and Loki's arcs tie the time heist directly to Doomsday

The trailer underlines this by including Steve readying to return the stones at the end of Endgame, reminding us of his mysterious off screen journey that ended with him staying in the past with Peggy Carter, a choice that is going to have consequences in Doomsday. They also highlight the moment Loki escapes with the Tesseract, which reminds viewers that the time heist put the god of mischief on the path that made him an agent of the Time Variance Authority, and eventually the one who saved the TVA by becoming the god of stories, a power I think Doom is going to be very interested in.

Several Battle of Earth shots have been recolored and brightened

The most visually striking thing about all of these shots in the new trailer is that they have been brightened, recolorized, and given sharper contrast. In the opening shot of Steve tightening the shield strap into a tourniquet, you can now see red in the open wound on his arm, when in the 2019 film you could hardly tell it was a wound at all. In the Avengers assemble charge, Cap, Hulk, and Thor all look far more colorful and sharper than they did originally, and you can now see Wanda glowing red behind them where she barely registered before.

The shots of Wanda fighting Thanos are noticeably more red on her and on the surrounding rubble in this version than in 2019. The blues and flesh tones across the group, especially on Cap fighting his 2012 variant, are brighter and crisper. Smart Hulk screaming while controlling the nano gauntlet is far more vibrant now, to the point that it looks like a 4K YouTube thumbnail that has had filters run over it. Thanos himself looks like a brighter shade of purple compared to the grayer version we got in 2019.

In the Spider-Man portal return and the Tony Stark snap, the new version properly saturates the oranges and reds of Tony's face and the blood on his cuts, whereas in the 2019 cut those cuts barely read as bloody at all, more like soot.

Colorist Tom Poole and a new director of photography for Doomsday

The colorist doing this work for Avengers is Tom Poole, co-founder of the coloring firm Company, who is also the senior colorist on Spider-Man Brand New Day. He has also colored plenty of films whose look people did not love, which is really a testament to a film's look being the product of a full team, the director, cinematographer, production designer, costumer, VFX supervisor, editor, and colorist together. Poole has said in interviews that his job is not to make his work stand out but to complement and underscore the cinematographer's vision. We do not actually know if Poole worked on this Encore trailer itself.

Endgame in 2019 was the capstone of an era of Marvel films directed by the Russo brothers working with cinematographer Trent Opaloch, who before them had shot Neill Blomkamp's shorts Yellow and Tempbot and his features District 9, Elysium, and Chappie. For Doomsday, the Russos are now partnering with Newton Thomas Sigel, a longtime cinematographer who has worked with them on AGBO films like Extraction and Cherry, and who previously shot several of the Fox X-Men films.

Why Endgame's original color grading got criticized, and what Doomsday's footage looks like now

Between 2016 and 2019, one recurring note on Marvel's films was their color grading, specifically the desaturated colors of the airport battle in Captain America: Civil War and the grayish, purplish wash of the Battle of Earth in Endgame. In 2016, YouTuber Patrick H. Willems argued that the Russos and Opaloch shooting on the Arri Alexa produced grading that lacked proper black values, leaving shots looking flat. In 2020, YouTuber Zero Wolf argued that crossover films face a harder color theory problem, since they have to fit many uniquely colored hero suits into one consistent palette, which often pushes colorists toward gray backgrounds.

I agree with Zero Wolf that Infinity War benefited from grouping the red toned heroes on Titan against a red backdrop while keeping everyone else on Earth. His read was that the Russos and Opaloch solved Endgame instead with a backlit setting for the Battle of Earth that desaturated everyone's suits under a layer of soot. I think many of those shots were stunning, but I am not sure the lighting and coloring served Endgame's style as well as it could have. The soot suited the bleakness of the stakes, but seven years later it strikes me as just another epic climax in the mold Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 set with the Battle of Hogwarts, very high contrast and very desaturated. I think a better looking battle came a year after that, in 2012's The Avengers, shot by Joss Whedon and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, which made no compromises on comic accurate, palette defined color diversity.

Looking at the Doomsday trailer footage so far, it is hard to tell whether the Russos are applying lessons from that history now that they are working with Sigel, Poole, and production designer Kasra Farahani. There is a lot of exterior gray rubble battling that reminds me of the Battle of Earth, plenty of backlighting like Endgame had, and at least a few dim interior fights that seem to dull the colors of Gambit and Shang-Chi, with Chris Evans looking like he forgot his costume. But the second teaser released at D23 showed extreme close-ups on the actors' faces with a level of detail that lets them do acting I do not think we have seen from any of them in their past Marvel roles, something raw and human that Infinity War and Endgame's marketing never really came close to.

Why Marvel might be recoloring Endgame now

So why recolor Endgame Encore to be more vibrant? Partly because I just think it objectively looks better this way, and it serves Marvel's goal of getting people into premium large format screens like IMAX, 4DX, and Dolby for the re-release. But I also think there is a second reason: the brighter colors feel like a creative attempt to reframe Endgame in viewers' minds as a precursor crossover event on the scale of 2012's Battle of New York, a slightly lesser, more polished prelude to the rawer, realer showdown they are about to deliver in Doomsday. Maybe that is also just to make sure a 2019 film looks as good as possible when we all pay to see it on IMAX. Probably both are true. Either way, this all looks great, so I am not complaining.

Do you think brightening Endgame's colors changes how the Battle of Earth will feel going into Doomsday?