You’ve just finished the three-hour finale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now what? Well, fortunately, there are more Marvel movies to come, but they’ll mostly be and/or feel like prequels and spinoffs. Avengers: Endgame was literally the end game for a lot of this franchise. Perhaps you’ll want to go back and re-watch the 22 episodes of this series all over again. Maybe you’ll just want to revisit the handful of MCU installments that are heavily linked to the plot of Endgame (stay tuned). Or, wouldn’t you like to check out some non-MCU films that might have influenced or are otherwise relevant to what you’ve just seen?
This week’s list of Movies to Watch After… was difficult to compile. For one, Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo for once needed to be tight-lipped about the stuff that inspired them here, to avoid spoiling anything. For another, the filmmakers were clearly influenced mostly by TV shows, whether sitcoms or their own work on the small screen or favorite series finales — Marvel head Kevin Feige has mentioned the one from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Personally, I was reminded of Lost, though more so of the Season 4 cliffhanger and the whole of Season 5’s idea of getting the band back together and going back to the island.
In the future, after spoilers don’t matter, we’re sure to hear more about old movies that sparked decisions for the Russo brothers and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. For now, here are some recommendations of movies, many of them as underrated or under-seen as Endgame is popular and prominent in the mainstream:
Captive State (2019)
While Endgame wasn’t screened for critics until very close to release, to avoid plot point leaks, Captive State skipped advance press screenings because Focus Features likely expected negative reviews. The movie did wind up with a low score on Rotten Tomatoes, and it also disappointed non-professional moviegoers and bombed at the box office. But it’s hardly a bad movie, just maybe not what critics or audiences were expecting. It’s also rather heavy-handed and overserious in the political text and subtext of its plot, enough to turn off a lot of people from even giving it a chance.
Sort of like Endgame, Captive State is a post-invasion sci-fi movie. Before the primary narrative begins, an alien threat has arrived on Earth and wiped out much of the planet’s population. While most of the survivors have accepted defeat and the need to just move on with life under the new circumstances, a team of rebels has organized an underground resistance against their new overlords to at least take back their world if not reverse what’s been done. Compared to Endgame, it’s definitely a smaller movie, but it’s also very much a sci-fi equivalent to ’70s conspiracy and spy thrillers, and I bet the Russos, who modeled their first MCU movie, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, off such ’70s classics as Three Days of the Condor, appreciate it.
The Wolverine (2013)
Here’s something a little more popular but still surprisingly not a huge hit. For as popular as Wolverine is, and has been the most consistently portrayed through the X-Men franchise, and has been shoehorned into almost every installment at least in cameo form, his solo efforts have been among the lowest grossing. In fact, The Wolverine had the worst domestic debut and sold the fewest amount of tickets in North America (it performed a little better overseas). Yet it’s one of the best of the X-Men movies. Well, for the first two acts, anyway. When it’s good, it’s very good.
The reason it’s on this list is that The Wolverine is the movie you want to watch if you wish there were more Ronin scenes in Endgame. Ronin scenes? Ronin is the bad haircut ninja version of Hawkeye when he goes vigilante post-snap. There should have been at least another sequence or a longer one showing how hardened he’d become, to match how merciless he claimed to be at Vormir. We don’t get enough of that distinction on screen, we’re just told. Not that The Wolverine is that much more violent, but we see more of Logan’s kills while he’s in Japan also fighting Yakuza gangsters, including one who just happens to be played by Hiroyuki Sanada, who deserves much better than his tiny role as a Yakuza killed by Ronin/Hawkeye in Endgame.
The Avengers (2012), Thor: The Dark World (2013), and Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
You’ve already been instructed to watch the whole of the MCU franchise, all 21 previous movies, prior to watching Endgame, but even if you’ve done that, unless maybe you sat through a marathon of all 22 installments in succession recently, you’re going to have a desire to go back and watch them all again. But there are three installments in particular that you’re likely really itching to revisit. Or see for the first time, given that one of my Endgame companions shockingly revealed afterward that he’d never seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Too bad for him, he didn’t get to appreciate the elevator scene callback.
There are three Marvel movies that are brought back for Endgame. The Avengers split up to collect all the Infinity Stones and three of the locations and times provide us with replays of scenes from The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, and Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s almost like the heroes of Endgame jump into those movies. Why is the generally disliked Thor 2 among them? Just for a Natalie Portman cameo? Or, maybe it’s because that was the first MCU movie scripted by Markus and McFeely? Probably it just makes sense for the needs of the mission within the movie.
Speaking of lesser movies in the MCU, as far as some fans are concerned, some of you may need to go back and see Iron Man 3 to be reminded of the kid who shows up during the funeral scene in Endgame. And The Incredible Hulk to see more of General Thunderbolt, who also shows up at the end of Endgame. And Doctor Strange for more of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One. And Thor: Ragnarok so you know about Valkyrie, Korg, and Miek. And you should watch Captain America: The First Avenger to recall the romantic origins of Steve and Peggy and why they needed to be together. Okay, just watch ’em all.
How to Survive a Plague (2012)
There’s a lot of wishful thinking in Endgame, to the point that it’d be treading into the alternate history genre if it were based in any kind of reality as we know it. Maybe it’s revisionist history for just the world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? The idea that the Avengers could resurrect billions of people lost to the greatest plague-slash-genocide of all time instead of continuing to mourn and move on is the great fortune of being fantasy characters with science fiction magic up their sleeves. After bringing back those lost from Thanos’ snap, can they go back and save the victims of all the holocausts and those who died from AIDS?
The Oscar-nominated How to Survive a Plague is my documentary pick this week not just because of its contrasting reality in relation to Endgame but also because of its similarities. No, I’m not so much thinking of Tony Stark’s emaciated appearance evoking late-stage AIDS patients so much as how the documentary follows a team of heroes in a comeback story in the wake of a tremendous tragedy. How to Survive a Plague focuses first on the losses of the AIDS epidemic and then tracks the work of Larry Kramer and the organizations ACT UP and TAG in their efforts to influence the FDA to approve drugs that help patients treat and manage, if not cure, HIV. It honors the dead while paying tribute to the saviors of countless others.
The Great Raid (2005)
Before Benjamin Bratt joined the MCU (hah, you forgot about his appearance in Doctor Strange, didn’t you?), he starred in this little war movie directed by John Dahl. Also featuring an ensemble made up of James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Sam Worthington, Mark Consuelos, and Connie Nielsen, The Great Raid attempts an accurate depiction of the real-life Raid at Cabanatuan, during which US Army Rangers and Alamo Scouts, with help from Filipino guerilla soldiers, went on a rescue mission to liberate hundreds of Allied POWs and civilian prisoners from a Japanese camp.
What makes the Raid at Cabanatuan more relevant to the events of Endgame than any other POW rescue movie is the number of people saved — people who’d pretty much been accepted as goners and were actually due for execution soon, a la the half of all living creatures post-snap following Avengers: Infinity War — plus the way that the mission was considered so important because hundreds of Allied prisoners, who like those at Cabanatuan were among the tens of thousands taken after the Battles of Bataan and Corregidor, were already burned to death in the Palawan massacre a month before.
The Great Raid was not well-received by critics when finally released after a long delay in 2005. I’ll admit, it does at times feel very pre-prestige-television TV movie in its dramatic tone, in a negative way. Franco’s voiceover is a bit much and the score is too heavy throughout. It’s kind of old-fashioned, so it does come across as over the top in its acting and too slow in its progression leading up to the action-packed third act. Some critics also called Endgame too long and too slow up until its spectacular third hour. If you prefer an actual old school war movie version of the same events, albeit somewhat fictionalized, I also recommend the 1945 film Back to Bataan, which stars John Wayne and features actual men rescued from Cabanatuan.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
When you think of perfect endings to movie franchises, the third part of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy should come to mind. If you’ve never seen it, obviously you also need to go back further and watch 2001’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and 2002’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. If you have seen them all, I still recommend you revisiting The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King because it was named Best Picture at the 2004 Academy Awards. Let’s compare the movie to Endgame. Should Marvel get its second Best Picture nod for their own series finale?
Just don’t look for any influence from The Lord of the Rings movies and The Return of the King in particular in the script for Endgame, since Markus told BuzzFeed he and McFeely worked hard to avoid doing what had been done there and what was done in the final installments of the Harry Potter series:
“’Lord of the Rings’ very much feels like they hit pause [between movies] and then hit play and the story continued. We really wanted to differentiate the movies in tone and in shape…We didn’t want a cliffhanger and then, you know, here they are on the cliff again! They fall all the way down to the bottom. So then what do you do after that?”
The Big Lebowski
Way out in New Asgard, there was this fella… Fella by the name of Thor Lebowski. He looks like Thor but has gotten out of shape and now wears sweaters in a style that makes him look like The Dude from The Big Lebowski. Instead of White Russians, though, he’s drinking craft beers from Georgia and Scotland. Like The Dude, he’s got two friends — Korg is his less angry Walter, while Miek is a less talkative Donny. They probably go bowling if there’s an alley in their new home on Earth. Sometimes the cable goes out, which is a shame because cable TV really tied the room together.
I only mention the movie because sometimes there’s a man… I won’t say a superhero, ’cause, what’s a superhero? But sometimes, there’s a man. And I’m talkin’ about Thor here. Sometimes, there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that’s Thor, in New Asgard. And even if he’s a lazy man — and Thor was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in Norway, which would place him high in the runnin’ for laziest worldwide. But sometimes there’s a man, sometimes, there’s a man. Aw. I lost my train of thought here. But… aw, hell. I’ve done introduced him enough.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Kevin Feige is a huge fan of Star Trek, and it shows. As mentioned in the intro, he was influenced by the series finale of The Next Generation in the making of Endgame, while some are theorizing that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is going to have a Search for Spock feel as the “Asgardians of the Galaxy” head out in search of Gamora. But as for Star Trek movies that are definitely directly felt in Endgame, there can be no doubt Feige and the rest of the filmmakers meant to evoke aspects of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
This movie, which similarly arrived a little over a decade since the start of the franchise’s life on the big screen, is something of a series finale itself. The Undiscovered Country is the last movie to feature all the original actors as the original characters of the original series. This was the end of Star Trek as fans knew it since the 1960s TV show as it said farewell to that iconic crew of the USS Enterprise after (and four years into) the franchise’s return to the small screen with the popular TNG series. Of course, like the MCU, Star Trek was not through, and we’d see some of the first era’s characters in later installments — Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov returned as soon as the next movie — but otherwise, this was a concluding chapter.
One big hint that Feige thought of this movie: Endgame‘s end credits features the signatures of the actors in the roles of the original six Avengers alongside their printed names. That’s something surely borrowed from The Undiscovered Country, the end credits for which kick off with the signatures of the seven main cast members of Star Trek: The Original Series.
Back to the Future Part II (1989)
There may be a blatant mention of the original Back to the Future, and there may be a desire to consider Back to the Future Part III since it was the final part of the film series as well as a conclusion to the cliffhanger ending of Back to the Future Part II. And like Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, the two Back to the Future sequels were shot back to back. But it’s that middle installment, Back to the Future Part II, which is most comparable to the plot of Endgame, so much that I’m shocked nobody followed up the mention of the original to say, “Hey, this all feels like Back to the Future Part II!” Sure, there’s a reference to Part II in the line about not betting on sporting events, but no one acknowledges that’s part of the sequel.
Obviously, there’s the whole middle act of Endgame with its “time heist” storyline that reminds at least the audience of the sequel. Like Marty McFly, the Avengers have to travel back in time to places they’ve been before in order to snag some MacGuffins while trying to avoid running into their past selves. This sort of fan service has a lot of fun with re-creating scenes from other movies (see those above), and I think BTTF2 deserves a lot of credit for doing it so well 30 years ago with fewer effects tools at its disposal. Both Endgame and BTTF2 also involve a villain finding out about the hero’s ability to time travel and then hijacking the time machine for his own nefarious purposes.
Uncommon Valor (1983)
I’ve already recommended on POW/MIA rescue movie, and that should suffice, but it’s also too true and realistic for me not to also highlight the ones fulfilling that post-Vietnam fantasy of action heroes going back and liberating the prisoners of that war. Before Missing in Action and Rambo: First Blood Part II made it all about one guy singlehandedly rescuing POWs, there was the ensemble-team-oriented Uncommon Valor, which was directed by the guy who made the original First Blood, Ted Kotcheff. Here you’ve got a ragtag group of guys with personal connections to the POWs they head out to find.
Those personal ties mostly involve a missing lieutenant whose father (Gene Hackman, playing a guy named Jason Rhodes, which is almost the same as War Machine’s alter ego) and former platoon mates are among the rescue team. That aligns it better with the stakes of Endgame than do movies like The Great Raid and, say, Saving Private Ryan, where the heroes don’t know the subject of their objective. Plus the team in Uncommon Valor isn’t a perfect bunch, plus there are newcomers some of them have never worked with before, so there’s infighting, just as there is in the Avengers.
It’s also worth noting — if you need more sci-fi/fantasy franchises on this list — that Uncommon Valor came out the same year as Return of the Jedi, which itself starts out as a POW/MIA rescue mission movie as Luke, Leia, and the rest of the Star Wars characters liberate Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt. That trilogy-concluding installment continued the franchise after a cliffhanger that saw Solo frozen in carbonite, which was like the Thanos snap of its time. If only Jabba the Hutt wound up traveling through time from before his death to deal with the rebel forces only to be killed all over again — but also ahead of time, as it were.
Red Desert (1964)
Here’s a movie I definitely wasn’t thinking of at all while watching Endgame. In fact, the works of Michelangelo Antonioni were probably furthest from my mind. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some of their DNA lurking around the corners of the busy, action-packed Marvel sequel. Without going too much into specifics with any particular Antonioni film (though Red Desert is mentioned) or his influence in general — again, there’s been a need to keep such things close to the chest — Joe Russo did reveal to IndieWire that he and his brother had the Italian filmmaker on their mind for the tone of Endgame:
“I don’t think ever before on this scale have characters ‘lost it’ so dramatically in a commercial film. And it does put them psychologically in a very profound place. And we can express that through the environments. Antonioni was one of our favorite filmmakers growing up and environment was always reflecting the psychology of the characters. We use the digital internegative in our real set design and in our CG set design to reflect psychology, but not in a way that’s as highly expressionistic as ‘Red Desert.’ But certainly when you watch [‘Endgame’], you’ll see how our choices reflect tone. These movies have incredible scale and fantastical settings. The real challenges are incredible photorealism and how you accomplish it in lighting and tone.”
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