End of an era: all of the updates, trailers, and commentary for Avengers: Endgame

Avengers: Endgame is finally getting an official post-credits scene, with a limited-time rerelease in theaters this weekend.

Marvel Studios co-president Kevin Feige told Screen Rant that a new version of Endgame will appear in theaters that has a couple of additional scenes not in the original. Feige said if people “stay and watch the movie, after the credits, there’ll be a deleted scene, a little tribute, and a few surprises.”

Warning: major spoilers ahead for Avengers: Endgame.

Avengers: Endgame is a big movie, and it does an admirable job of wrapping up more than a decade’s worth of story threads for the long-running film franchise. But even though the film mostly closes out the Infinity Saga, even though it skips the usual post-credits tease for the next Marvel Cinematic Universe movie in order to feel more like a complete story, it still leaves open questions. Some are about the franchise’s future, and some are about how the film actually hangs together. So we’ve put together a guide to the biggest questions that Endgame leaves behind.

Avengers: Endgame will stream exclusively on Disney+, the company’s upcoming streaming service, beginning on December 11th, roughly one month after the service’s launch. Disney CEO Bob Iger made the announcement as part of the company’s quarterly earnings report this afternoon.

Iger also noted that the company is “very pleased with our Q2 results and thrilled with the record-breaking success of Endgame,” adding that it is currently the second-highest grossing film of all time, following James Cameron’s Avatar. Endgame broke records with its release, pulling in more than $1.2 billion during its opening weekend, which topped Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ $517 million worldwide opening weekend.

As the world continues to be consumed by Avengers: Endgame hype, Oppo has put out a special edition phone that ties into Marvel’s cinematic behemoth. Here’s our first look at the Oppo F11 Pro Marvel’s Avengers Limited Edition, to give it its full name.

The F11 Pro is a mid-range phone that Oppo first released in India a couple of months ago. Based on the historical relationship between Oppo’s F-series and sister company OnePlus’ flagship phones, as well as some extensive leaks, the OnePlus 7 is likely to look pretty similar to this device. OnePlus actually put out its own Avengers-themed phone last year around the release of Infinity War; now it’s Oppo’s turn for Endgame.

The oddest cameo in Avengers: Endgame isn’t from Stan Lee or co-director Joe Russo. The cameo by Fortnite, the popular online battle royale game, is the one with the biggest ramifications for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And that’s because it raises an awkward question: does Fortnite’s Thanos mode also exist in the Avengers universe? And if so, what does that mode look like in a post-Snap world?

The limited-time Thanos game mode shook up the traditional Fortnite formula, forcing players to team up to fight against the super-powered, Infinity Gauntlet-wielding Mad Titan. Yes, Fortnite’s Thanos mode, and the subsequent Avengers: Endgame mode that succeeded it this year, are marketing tools for our universe’s Avengers movies, which probably don’t exist in the Marvel world, unless there are some very, very dedicated documentarians out there.

Avengers: Endgame has crossed another huge box office milestone: it’s become the fastest film ever to earn more than $2 billion at the worldwide box office, and has become the second-biggest film release ever, according to Deadline.

The film earned a jaw-dropping $1.2 billion on its opening weekend across the world, and has broken a ton of records since its release: it became the highest-grossing Thursday release ever, the biggest opening weekend ever (in the US and globally), biggest opening in China and India, the largest second weekend box office ever, the fastest to earn more than $1 billion, now the fastest to earn $2 billion, and it’s surpassed the box office totals of Avengers: Infinity War, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Titanic. Given that the film has only been out for a week, it seems likely that it’ll climb up a couple of more spaces, and maybe surpass Avatar’s $2.7 billion total gross.

Warning: spoilers ahead for season 8 of Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame.

The morning of Game of Thrones’ long-awaited Battle of Winterfell episode, “The Long Night,” Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo tweeted a fan-made picture of the Night King and Thanos face-to-face, with the hashtag #WeWannaSeeThisFight. But the truth about the villains — two of the most significant in popular culture this decade and both coming to their biggest, death-filled clashes in one weekend — is that they have no reason to fight each other. Based on what we know about their goals, their fight is essentially the same.

Tasha: So let’s be frank about this: we started having a version of this conversation a week ago when Julia said she was super into the Night King on Game of Thrones. We talked about her writing a piece about villain-lust, coming in part out of a Tumblr and pop culture outlet trend toward drooling over characters like Venom and thirsting after thicc daddy Thanos. And then this Mashable piece about the Night King hit, full of references to Night Bae and “Ice me, Night Daddy” and “temperature play.”

So, okay. I get it. Bad boys have always been kind of hot. Since the dawn of time, critics have been writing about how villains are more compelling than heroes. Marilyn Hacker’s classic poem “She Bitches About Boys” sums it up beautifully: “Girls love a sick child or a healthy animal. / A man who’s both itches them like an incubus.”

A spoiler warning for Avengers: Endgame, the newest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will run alongside the new Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer.

It’s rumored that the new trailer will be released on May 6th, and it will feature “a special message from Tom Holland, warning viewers that the trailer will contain spoilers for Avengers: Endgame,” according to Trailer Track’s report. The site is reporting that a clip from the Far From Home trailer “was sent out, alongside the new trailer, to German cinemas today.”

Significant spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones, season 8, episode 3, “The Long Night,” and for Avengers: Endgame.

Heading into last weekend, we were expecting a lot of big, meaningful pop-culture deaths. Avengers: Endgame threatened to kill off some major Marvel Cinematic Universe characters, as the franchise opened up to new sequels and spinoffs. A lot of Game of Thrones characters we’ve seen grow up over eight years were also on the line, as they faced a seemingly endless army of the undead, with the battlefield clearing for one final ruler of Westeros. Only one of these stories actually delivered on those expectations, though, while the other served up just half of the promise.

Avengers: Endgame debuted this weekend, breaking box-office records and speeding to a staggering $1.2 billion weekend take. It’s Marvel’s biggest movie ever, and at the current rate of ticket sales, it might just wind up as the biggest movie of all time. It’s hard to discuss Endgame as a single film, or even as the second half of the two-part story that started with Avengers: Infinity War, given how heavily it relies on the buildup of the other previous 20 films in Marvel Studios’ decade-plus of filmmaking. Forget smaller, more character-focused films like Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther, or even Captain Marvel. Endgame is here to throw everything Marvel has at the audience, in one huge, spectacle-filled hurrah.

Naturally, there’s a lot to digest in this movie. So we sat down to discuss how Marvel got to this point, consider Endgame’s nagging issues, and figure out what the film’s ending means for Marvel’s future.

Spoiler alert: This essay includes no specific single plot points from Avengers: Endgame, but does mention some broad plot ideas that could be considered significant spoilers.

At three hours long, Avengers: Endgame is a lot of movie, which means it has a lot of room for the things fans love about the Marvel Cinematic Universe — as well as the things some critics find frustrating about it. Sometimes, it’s both thrilling and frustrating at the same time — especially when it’s a movie dealing with time travel.

Disney’s latest blockbuster has smashed box office records, pulling in an astonishing $1.2 billion globally in its opening weekend, according to Variety. It’s the eighth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to cross the billion-dollar mark, and it’s the fastest any film has ever earned that much.

The film topped The Force Awakens opening day record from 2015 with a $305 million global box office on Thursday (it pulled in $60 million in the US), and went on to earn around $300 million in the US over the course of the weekend.

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

“The Book of Nora,” the series finale of The Leftovers, HBO’s adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s existential mystery novel, which ran for three seasons between 2014 and 2017. Perrotta and former Lost writer-producer Damon Lindelof covered most of the book’s plot in the first 10 episodes, then spent the next 18 working increasingly strange and soulful variations on their themes. Both on the page and on the screen, The Leftovers was set in a world where 2 percent of the population simultaneously and inexplicably disappears, years before the story begins. In the finale, one of the show’s main characters, Nora Durst (played by Carrie Coon), accepts an invitation from a shadowy organization to finally have her questions about “the Departed” answered. Lindelof and Perrotta claimed throughout the run of this series that they cared less about the “why” and “how” of the missing population than the “what happens next.” But the finale does offer an answer — sort of — to the question of what happened on the day of the Sudden Departure.

Google Search is home to a new Easter egg celebrating today’s theatrical release of Avengers: Endgame. Just Google “Thanos” on desktop or mobile, and then click the gauntlet. Go ahead, I’ll wait...

In the mean time maybe check out our spoiler-free review.

Battle royale video games are not really power fantasies, especially if you’re one of the majority of players on the losing end of a match. Being dropped onto an island with fellow scavengers and scrounging around for what little firearms and ammo you can get your hands on creates a tense, anything-can-happen atmosphere. You’re supposed to feel vulnerable all the time. That’s not the case in Fortnite’s big Avengers: Endgame crossover event. The limited-time game mode is all about feeling overly powerful — like a superhero — to spectacular effect.

Whether you’re on the side of humanity, wielding one of the many heroic weapons taken from the Marvel universe, or whether you’re part of Thanos’ army — with its jetpacks and energy weapons with unlimited ammo — the mode elevates the entire Fortnite experience to a level of almost absurd chaos. The mode builds off the Infinity War limited-time event from last year, tweaking the formula in smart ways and making sure everyone can have a little bit of fun, even when they lose.

We’re approaching a weird weekend of pop culture grief. Thursday, April 25th, marks the release of Avengers: Endgame, the follow-up to Avengers: Infinity War, in which literally half the universe died. Just a few days later, on Sunday, April 28th, the latest episode of Game of Thrones will send the majority of the show’s surviving cast into an epic battle with the undead horde of White Walkers sweeping down from beyond the Wall. Both Endgame and Game of Thrones have something unusual in common: they’re installments of long-running, immensely popular franchises where the audience widely expects they’re about to see their favorite characters die.

That’s rare in a cultural environment that thrives on endless sequels, prequels, spinoffs, and reboots, and the expectations that all of the most popular characters will be endlessly available for new stories. It’s particularly rare in the fantasy and superhero genre, which tends to be about escapism, power fantasies, and wish-fulfillment. Usually, in films and TV, heroes fight hard-won battles and win. Sometimes, they lose love interests or sidekicks, and once in a great while, they die at the end of their stories. But this weekend feels like an unprecedented cultural watershed. Two different major franchises are passing the torch on to other series, shows, and stars. Both franchises are implicitly promising that major characters will die. No one in fandom is entirely sure what to expect. Two Verge writers talk the moment out together.

Spoiler alert: This article does not address or reveal any plot points from Avengers: Endgame. It’s just a recommendation for a specific refresher course. Trust us on this one.

Ahead of the release of Avengers: Endgame, anti-spoiler mania has reached a point of frenzy, driven in part by the directors’ anti-spoiler statement, a seemingly actively malicious pro-spoiler movement, and an extremely popular social media hashtag urging people not to be dicks about it. The Verge is so on board that our spoiler-free review doesn’t reveal a single plot point from the movie, and neither will this post.

Update May 10th, 1:54PM ET: While Avengers: Endgame was released without a post-credits scene, Marvel Studios is adding a trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home to the end of the film.

The latest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, Avengers: Endgame, is just starting to hit screens, and already, there are reports of viewers ending the movie with a titanic groan of disgust. It’s not because they hated the movie — which is actively designed as a rousing payoff for 10 years of MCU films — but because they stayed all the way through the credits, and got nothing. There’s no friendly visual joke with a giant ant, no rush straight into the next movie, no low-key, wordless sit-down with some shawarma.

Spoiler notice: this review expressly doesn’t spoil any specific plot points in Avengers: Endgame whatsoever, but does discuss general themes, ideas, and cast members.

It’s been just over a decade since Marvel Studios launched its flagship franchise of interconnected comics-inspired movies with 2008’s Iron Man, and even now it’s difficult to begin to evaluate how much that franchise has changed the face of filmmaking. After 10 years, 21 films, nearly a dozen television shows, countless tie-in comics and games and merchandising options and viral videos, and billions upon billions of dollars in earnings, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the Holy Grail that every major studio is questing after, usually with little success. The MCU films have set off a mania for interconnected multi-platform franchises and multi-film arcs, not to mention a still-growing tide of superhero stories in every possible medium.

Marvel didn’t invent the post-credits stinger, but from the moment Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury showed up at the end of Iron Man a decade ago, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has absorbed post-credit sequences as a signature calling card. Batman v. Superman director Zack Snyder even said he didn’t include one at the end of his film “because Marvel does that.” Sure, Iron Man was wildly successful, but the massive, interconnected universe that’s barreling toward an endpoint in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame was launched when Fury told Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), “I’m here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative.”

Coming up on the release of Endgame — the second half of the giant, star-studded, two-part culmination of Marvel’s 10-year release strategy — I’d like to propose something radical: there shouldn’t be a post-credits scene.

The end of Avengers: Infinity War did not leave our heroes in the best places, and Marvel’s latest trailer for Avengers: Endgame looks to drive home that point. It features a solemn recap of the earliest days of the franchise to drive home just how far the heroes — and fans — have come.

Like previous trailers, the latest clip is light on details for what will come in the big finale that Endgame promises to be. But a repeating mantra is that the Avengers will do “whatever it takes” to try and undo the damage that Thanos (Josh Brolin) has done — even if Thanos himself fails to make an appearance in the trailer.

Spoilers ahead for Captain Marvel’s mid-credits and post-credits scenes, for Avengers: Infinity War, and for one big gag in Captain Marvel itself.

Back in 2008, when Nick Fury arrived at Tony Stark’s house to invite him to join the Avengers Initiative after the credits rolled, the sequence felt like most post-credit scenes did back then — a little in-joke for dedicated viewers who cared enough to sit all the way through the credits, instead of bolting for the doors the moment the action stopped. But over the past decade, Marvel’s post-credits scenes have become an institution. Occasionally, they’re just visual gags and callbacks to previous story elements, like Ant-Man and the Wasp’s 20-second view of Ant-Man’s abandoned house, with a super-sized ant playing his drum set. Usually, though, they’re a way of building anticipation for an upcoming film in the series, like when Avengers: Infinity War ended with Nick Fury summoning off-world hero Captain Marvel with a dated-looking pager, just before he dissolved in the wake of Thanos’ universe-changing finger-snap.

Avengers: Endgame is only a few months away, and a new teaser that aired during the Super Bowl tonight offers another glimpse into what fans can expect.

The new trailer focuses on the heroes that are still here — and asking where everyone else has gone. It also includes a new look at Hawkeye, who was missing in the Avengers: Infinity War.

By the time Avengers: Endgame comes out, there will be 22 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you’ve skipped one or two, there may be some lingering questions after watching Endgame’s first trailer.

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp.]