Earlier this month, The Hollywood Reporter published an article on the box office projections for Avengers: Endgame and mentioned that the film’s runtime is 3 hours and 58 seconds.
In an interview with ComicBook.com, that was finally confirmed by co-director Joe Russo, who gave the same length when asked how long the upcoming sequel would run for. As such, it sounds like audiences will have to stay in their seats for quite a while when they head into theaters later this month and they might want to make sure they use the bathroom before they do so.
That’s because according to Kevin Feige, Endgame won’t really have any moments where audiences will be able to leave their screening and go pee. Speaking to io9, the producer noted that when they crafted the film, they wanted to make it so that there wouldn’t be a good time to head to the washroom – meaning that we’ll likely be gripped to our seats by what’s happening on screen for the entire runtime.
“What I’ve always said is a movie is as long as it should be. And we are not fans of overindulging movies. We are not fans of laborious lengths for no reason. We are fans of movies that you wish didn’t end. Movies that you want to see again as soon as it’s over. And movies that you just don’t ever find a good time to run out to the bathroom.
That’s when a movie’s working. And if a movie doesn’t feel like that to us we continue to trim, we continue to shape, we continue to bring that time down. That happened to a certain extent on this movie. But we got to a point where it feels very exciting and goes by very quickly and in the end is the perfect length. And everybody that saw the movie felt the same way.”
Feige certainly makes some good points here, and as The Lord of the Rings trilogy showed everyone, most moviegoers are perfectly willing to sit down for a 3-hour blockbuster if the material interests them enough. And in the case of Avengers: Endgame, you can bet that everyone will be more than happy to indulge in over 180 minutes of MCU action.
Of course, the one point of concern here is that a 3-hour runtime will limit the number of daily screenings the film can have, thus potentially hurting its box office numbers. And while that may be true, early projections are looking pretty rosy for Avengers: Endgame, and we fully expect it to blow any and all records out of the water when it finally lands in theaters on April 26th.