Old Movies vs. New Movies: How ‘Avengers: Endgame Encore’ Beat Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson, and an Awesome Weekend Movie Lineup

Key takeaways

• "Avengers: Endgame Encore" topped the box office with $26 million despite offering almost nothing new visually (Sean calls the "Infinity Vision" premium format a "PLF scam") and includes four brief new scenes (a Loki cameo interrupting Cap and Peggy's dance, a TVA sequence hinting at collapsing timelines including an X-Men Earth, Mark Ruffalo's Hulk being confronted by an unseen Doctor Doom, and Doom forging his mask) designed to undo the tidy endings given to Captain America and Iron Man ahead of "Avengers: Doomsday."
• Reissues are surging: 17 of this year's 200 highest-grossing US films are re-releases, up from 15 in 2024 and 11 in 2023, spanning "Cars," "Top Gun," "Fellowship of the Ring," and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II." The hosts trace this to pandemic-era cinephilia, movies becoming "eventized," and studios filling off-peak slots (like Wednesday matinees packed with kids for Studio Ghibli screenings).
• Mahershala Ali's "Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother," from director Bassam Tariq (who was once attached to Marvel's "Blade"), is the standout new release—a devout hitman races across Houston to find breast milk for his infant after his wife dies, blending brutal katana action with a devastatingly specific portrait of parental desperation that both hosts compare to their own pandemic-era formula shortage panic.
• David Ayer's "Heart of the Beast," starring Brad Pitt and four German Shepherds playing one combat dog, made $20 million on the strength of dog-movie sentimentality even though Pitt's performance is largely remote and checked-out except for one late emotional scene; part of what the hosts see as a broader pattern (also seen in "F1," "Wolfs," and "The Lost City") of Pitt coasting through his early-60s "elder statesman" action phase.
• DreamWorks' animated "Forgotten Island," rooted in Filipino mythology and centered on two teenage girls' friendship, underperformed with just $12 million; both hosts found its Spider-Verse-style hyperactive editing overwhelming for young kids (Amanda's four-year-old spent two-thirds of the film hiding in her seat) even while praising its emotional core and cultural specificity.
• "The Love Hypothesis," a Amazon rom-com starring Lily Reinhart, originated as Reylo (Rey/Kylo Ren) Star Wars fan fiction with the character names swapped out; part of a broader, lower-budget "fanfic-to-streaming-rom-com pipeline" that the hosts argue is diluting the genre with weak scripts and TV-level production value rather than reviving it.

Notable moments

• "This is a PLF scam, which is what we knew it was when they announced it"; Sean's verdict on Endgame's "Infinity Vision" reissue.
• Amanda tears up during the reissue's climactic "women assemble" shot and jokes she mailed the tear to the White House with a note reading "believe women."
• Sean recounts crowds standing through the entire end-credits sequence, unsure whether the new bonus scenes existed, then missing part of a screening himself because he stayed to watch them.
• On "Heart of the Beast": "The dog gets all the applause moments. The dog gets all the emotionality of the movie"; while Pitt's performance is largely "on autopilot."
• Discussing "Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother," Amanda says the search for breast milk was "way scarier than any horror movie I've seen"; a callback to her own real memory of driving to nineteen pharmacies during the 2021 formula shortage.
• On "The Love Hypothesis": "This is one of the most popular movies in America right now... if this is the movie that is for women this weekend, it's very disappointing."
• John Wilson describes bootlegging DVDs from dumpster-dived Blockbuster promo cases as a teenager and being repeatedly rejected for a job there; "it's probably why I ended up opening my own movie theater."

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