Avengers: Endgame Runtime Addressed by Writers
Avengers: Endgame screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely say the film was always [...]
Avengers: Endgame screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely say the film was always going to be three-something hours long.
"There was an agreement within the whole group that we're going to take our time; we're not going to cut a half-hour of it so we can get one more screening in per day," Markus said in conversation with the New York Times.
"We couldn't! Where are you going to cut a half-hour? There was not a sequence you could cut," McFeely said.
Markus added, "Look at some of the most popular movies of all time. They're long as hell. When people want to see something, it doesn't seem to get in their way. There's some short, totally unsuccessful movies, too."
The three-hour, two-minute runtime of Endgame hasn't slowed moviegoers: the Marvel Studios blockbuster won $356 million domestically and $866m overseas in its rollout, scoring an unprecedented $1.22 billion worldwide in its first weekend.
In February, directors Anthony and Joe Russo said the film's heightened emotion — and it serving as the culmination of an 11-year, 22-movie arc — necessitated the longest run time of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
"This is a culmination film of 22 movies, it's a lot of storytelling to work into it," Joe Russo told Collider. "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."
Earlier this month, Joe said the film's run time "really hasn't changed since we executed the first cut of the film."
"Even though we've shot a lot of footage between now and then, we've swapped things out and the water keeps rising to the same level because the story's so dense," he told Box Office Pro. "We have so many characters that we're working with again that require that kind of run time."
In turn, three hours is necessary for the plot and its many characters to breathe. "We not only had to resolve our own movies but all the other MCU movies from the last 10 years," Anthony told IndieWire.
The sendoff for this first chapter of the MCU meant definitive, tailor-made endings for Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), among others.
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