It hasn’t even been 10 years, and “Avengers: Endgame” already feels old.
Great, perhaps. Epic, certainly. Entertaining, always. But when it came out “Endgame” was the culmination of more than a decade of non-stop Marvel enthusiasm. It felt like an ending, and that’s something few ongoing franchises ever have. That sense of finality made “Endgame” feel important, but watching it again seven years later, that sensation is gone.
Watching “Avengers: Endgame” today is like watching one season finale of a beloved, long-running TV series. Sure, it’s arguably the best episode, but the midpoint of a story isn’t the same as its conclusion. Especially if that’s when the series peaked.
Unlike the Avengers, the rest of us can’t go back in time. “Avengers: Endgame” hit differently in 2019, after the cliffhanger of “Avengers: Infinity War” ended in an unthinkable gut punch. Not only did the villain win, he won by committing the ultimate act of genocide, murdering literally half of the creatures in the universe. Thanos’ victims included many of the most beloved characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including Black Panther, Spider-Man, and most of the Guardians of the Galaxy.
“Avengers: Infinity War” debuted in April of 2018. The conclusion wasn’t released until almost exactly one year later, and although Marvel put out “Ant-Man and the Wasp” and “Captain Marvel” in the middle, those films were prequels and did nothing to answer our questions or hint, at least directly, at how the story would continue. Marvel left audiences in rapt suspense for so long that even if “Avengers: Endgame” was abysmal, there was no way we wouldn’t go see it. If Willy Wonka was standing next to us in early 2019 and said “This suspense is terrible, I hope it will last,” everyone would have punched him.
There’s no way to replicate that context in 2026. We can watch “Infinity War” and “Endgame” without any gap in between. The odds that future generations will take historical context seriously enough to wait a whole year between movies, just to know what it felt like, are practically nil. Besides, they’ll already know how it turns out and what happened next. Every film and television series that came out afterwards, the good ones and the bad ones alike, rob “Avengers: Endgame” of its finality, and with it the practically unlimited power it once, briefly, had.
It’s easy to watch “Avengers: Endgame” today and get swept up in minor distractions. The time travel rules don’t always make sense, but that’s true for all time travel movies. The idea that only the Infinity Stones have the power to alter reality and bring half the universe back to life, and that the Avengers had to wait five whole years to solve that problem, doesn’t hold water after you’ve seen “Thor: Love and Thunder” and know all they had to do was travel to the realm of Eternity and get a free wish. Instead of traveling through time to collect all the Infinity Stones, where they only have one chance to get it right (even though all they had to do was steal the Time Stone first, which would have solved all their problems), they could have taken a day trip with Stormbreaker and everything would have been hunky-dory.
It’s unfortunate that Marvel spent a lot of time post-“Endgame” making “Endgame” feel less important. The drawer full of Infinity Stones at the Time Variance Authority, who think so little of them they’re basically paperweights, was a slap in the face. We can let that slide if we want to, and just appreciate “Avengers: Endgame” on its own merits as though all those other films and TV shows didn’t exist, but that only works if you were there in 2019, before any of those other stories were told. Future generations will never know what it was like to be able to sit with “Endgame” and its ramifications, blissfully unaware of any future releases.
We sat back in the theater after the credits rolled, as if we just ran a 10+ year marathon and never felt so alive. Going back to the film today — just a few months before “Avengers: Doomsday” will no doubt make a lot of money, but doesn’t have the same tangible aura of enthusiasm — “Endgame” plays less like a great movie and more like an important historical flashpoint.
You can go back to many of the other classic blockbusters, the ones that made unthinkable amounts of money and became cultural touchstones, and appreciate them on their own merits. “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” may have been mired in early 1980s anxieties about newfound children of divorce, and it may be hard to believe that the 1973 con artist caper “The Sting” sold so many tickets it would have grossed over a billion dollars today, but they can still be appreciated as wonderful stories on their own.
“Avengers: Endgame” doesn’t have that luxury. It was the 22nd film in an ongoing franchise, and the filmmakers assume you’ve seen all of those other movies. You can follow the plot if you haven’t seen any other Marvel films but you won’t understand the significance of the movie’s seemingly countless callbacks to previous storylines, and the emotional heft attached to characters who barely appear on-screen in the 2019 film but had their own movies beforehand.
Imagine trying to tell someone they need to read 21 books to fully appreciate one of the most popular books of all time. Some people will be excited by that challenge but many more will lose interest. Many of the most popular movies ever released are considered obscure by modern standards. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone under 25 years old who’s seen “Doctor Zhivago” but it put more butts in seats than the three most recent “Star Wars” movies combined. And you don’t have to watch 21 movies to appreciate “Doctor Zhivago.”
Time moves fast and it takes many of the most popular movies with it. If you haven’t noticed yet, it’ll happen to your generation’s blockbusters eventually — this year’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” broke the box office record that “Endgame” set seven years ago.
“Avengers: Endgame” is still too fresh in our minds to be forgotten, but revisiting it today, even in advance of another potentially epic (and hopefully great) cinematic event in the same franchise, the only way to relive the sensations we felt when it first came out is to indulge in our nostalgia. After all, we were there. We did the homework and we did it willingly, with pleasure. But if you weren’t there you’ll never understand why it wasn’t just fun, and wasn’t just involving, and wasn’t just epic — it was the most important movie that had ever been released. And for a while it still was.
Now, it’s a movie. A great movie, an epic movie, a fun movie, but a movie.
And that’s okay, but to accept that means accepting that we’re getting older, and the art we love isn’t always going to have the same impact. Our favorite films will age just like we do. Some will get better with the passage of time. Some will get worse and others will be forgotten. “Avengers: Endgame” will always have a special chapter in the history books dedicated to its once-in-a-lifetime success. But it won’t always have the power it used to.
It already doesn’t.
