‘Avengers: Endgame’ Directors Tease Three-Hour Runtime

An assembly cut of a film will typically get widdled down before it hits theaters, with the theatrical cut typically being a more streamlined product. Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo previously teased that the film could be nearly three hours, confirming their suspicions recently with Collider about the upcoming film.

“I think the studio is down with what the best story is. 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,” Joe Russo revealed. “We’re 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. 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.”

The shortest installments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are The Incredible Hulk and Thor: The Dark World, both clocking in at an hour and 52 minutes. The longest entry is Avengers: Infinity War, which is two hours and 40 minutes. The average length of the films has slowly increased since Iron Man in 2008, with the longest entries being massive team-ups like the Avengers films and Captain America: Civil War.

Given the nature of the upcoming film, Russo confirmed, “This one, in particular, feels like three hours worth of real estate.”

The directors previously updated fans on the progress of the film in December, teasing that the project could be the longest entry yet into the MCU.

“There’s a high probability that this movie will clock in at around three hours,” Joe Russo admitted to Empire Magazine. “It’s a big movie with a lot of story.”

Early reports about a film’s runtime can be taken with a grain of salt, because those numbers typically reflect the inclusion of every scene that was shot. With these most recent comments about Avengers: Endgame coming six weeks after the filmmakers’ previous comments about the film’s length, it would appear as though the film won’t be suffering drastic cuts in the coming months leading into release. Even with substantial edits, we won’t be surprised if this film tops Infinity War‘s runtime.

Avengers: Endgame lands in theaters on April 26th.

Other upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe films include Captain Marvel on March 8th and Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5th.