Avengers: Endgame ‘feels like three hours worth of real estate’ says director

Marvel fans have been anticipating Avengers: Endgame to be an epic finale to the current crop of MCU films and a recent update by the directors has all but solidified a runtime to live up to those expectations.

While the film was clocking in at the three-hour mark back in November, early edits of films are always a little unwieldy and still closer to the assembly edit (where components are mostly reordered to tell the story rather than cut down) than the final product. Now that Joe and Anthony Russo have recently spoken to Collider, explaining that the film is maintaining course to be the longest entry yet in the superhero universe, it looks much more likely that Endgame could be setting records. “We’re still at the three-hour mark,” Joe confirmed.

But why is this film almost half an hour longer than the current longest MCU film (Infinity War at 2h 40m)? “I think the studio is down with what the best story is,” the directors said. “Right now, we think the movie is playing well and we’ve had great responses from our test audiences and we’re feeling very good about where it is."

That said, the pair are “still doing work to it.”

“We’re not done with it. Again, this is a culmination film of 22 movies, it’s a lot of storytelling to work into it,” the Russos said.” “Emotion is an intrinsic part of that to us. When you have to tell a really complicated story and you want strong emotional moments with the characters, it just requires a certain amount of real estate. This one, in particular, feels like three hours worth of real estate.”

That’s a lot of story. In a film that’s primary motivation doesn’t seem like defeating a villain, but defeating reality itself, that means a lot of plot to explain, undo, and finalize — and fewer fights because of it. And that closure enough looks to keep audiences glued to their seats.

“We have screened the movie four times for audiences now,” Anthony said. “For the first three screenings, not a single person got up to go to the bathroom.” Do you think you’ll be rapt for the entire three hours of Endgame? Just, you know, might wanna skip that MegaGulp.