In 2019, the marketing for Avengers: Endgame was so secretive that most people sitting in the theater didn’t know it was a time travel movie. We had no clue how our heroes were going to save half of existence, especially when Thanos destroyed the stones and died minutes into the movie. I remember watching it for the first time, realizing they were about to go full Back to the Future Part II, and completely losing my shit.

Seven years later, everyone sitting in the theater this weekend for Avengers Endgame: Encore knows it’s a time travel movie. They know every line, every moment, and many already know all the teases Marvel included for its next film, Avengers: Doomsday (those leaked about 24 hours before the film actually hit theaters). And while those teases, of which there are four, will be the main thing drawing people into the theater, what they’ll leave with is something more personal than that. They’ll leave with the memories of a night in the summer of 2019 when Marvel Studios was at the peak of its powers, and we all smiled, cried, and cheered our hearts out as one.

That was a great feeling. One that has been all too rare in the seven years since. Since the original release of Endgame , Marvel Studios has famously struggled to gain the momentum it built up in the years previous. It’s had a few slam dunks ( WandaVision, Loki, the Spider-Man movies), a few duds ( Thor: Love and Thunder, Captain America: Brave New World ), and a lot of in-between.

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