'Avengers: Endgame' Directors on Runtime and Intermission Rumors

Avengers: Endgame submitted its final cut on Friday. The Russo Brothers introduced a couple of clips from the film to members of the press before walking over to Disney's animation offices, finalizing some VFX shots, and submitting the completed movie. The final run time: 3 hours and 58 seconds long. With the lengthy run time, the directing duo of Anthony and Joe Russo have managed to squeeze in every story beat they wanted but never considered offering a bathroom break intermission despite some rumors.

"[Fitting everything into the run time] was very much worked out on the script level with [Christopher] Markus and [Stephen] McFeely," Joe Russo told ComicBook.com. "We spent a long time with them exploring all the possibilities and honing down on what the essential storytelling was. That's such a complex question. You can't really be dealing with that once you get to production. That's definitely a script issue."

"Yeah, focus and discipline is what it comes down to," Anthony Russo added. "We like to keep the stories propulsive. It was painful for us to come in at three hours, but we just couldn't get the story down from that."

The longstanding rumor of Marvel Studios or the Russo Brothers having considered an intermission during theatrical showings of Avengers: Endgame were never anything more than that.

"We joked about it," Joe Russo said. "We would joke about that."

"We discussed it in jest," Anthony Russo added.

"We may have even put our own intermission into it for when we would screen it, and give ourselves five minutes to go to the bathroom," Joe Russo joked. "We're telling everybody to prep as if they're going into surgery. Don't have any water or anything to drink post-midnight the day before the film, and you'll be fine."

Still, despite all of the rumors and speculation, they are confident that all of the theories online regarding Endgame's outcome are as accurate as the rumors of an intermission.

"The amazing thing is how many people out there are paying very close attention to these characters, understand these characters on a very deep level, and have imaginations that are really active and surprising in terms of where they can take these characters," Anthony Russo said. "We spend months and months and months thinking about all the possibilities. So there are a lot of ideas that we run down that are nothing like what the movie ends up being. It's just part of the process. There's so many different places you can go with a narrative, that sometimes some of them get somewhat close, but nothing is ever exactly what the movie is, just because there is a level of detail in the movie that goes way beyond. Most theories you read online, they take three or four sentences to convey. The movie is a very dense document."

Are you glad Avengers: Endgame is clocking in at more than three hours in length? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Twitter, @BrandonDavisBD!

Avengers: Endgame hits theaters on April 26.