Hold on to your butts. Whatever it takes.
The internet is all aflutter today after a new AMC Theatres landing page for Avengers: Endgame, spotted by Comicbook.com, seemingly confirmed prior rumours that the culmination of 10 years of Marvel movie teasing will run a whopping three hours and two minutes long.
The page has since been updated to remove any reference to the gargantuan run time, but more fuel has been thrown on the fire by a tweet from official ticket retailer Fandango, restating the 182-minute length and linking back to Comicbook.com’s report.
3 hours, 2 minutes.#AvengersEndgamehttps://t.co/339TN48C7o pic.twitter.com/dzcqzgzup8
— Fandango (@Fandango) March 25, 2019
If we take it that reputable organisations like Fandango and AMC aren’t just sharing misinformation for social media engagement’s sake—telling lies, on the internet, oh, the absurdity of it all!—there’s seemingly enough evidence to point towards this being Avengers: Endgame’s run time…even if Disney Marvel itself has yet to officially confirm it.
And the company remains reticent to do so. When reached for comment about the reports and Fandango’s seeming verification, Disney would only point io9 to prior comments the Russo brothers made to the press about the editing process on Endgame, like Joe Russo discussing the three-hour number with Collider in the run-up to Infinity War’s release last year.
I’ll say it could easily be a three hour film, but I think that, you know, we’re very hard on the material. We like it to play at a certain pace. I’m sure that we’ll squeeze it. I can’t imagine… we have a whole year of work left on that movie. I do think it will be longer than [Infinity War], but it’s clearly impossible to say.
We’ve asked Disney for clarification on whether they could explicitly confirm or deny the report beyond this, and will update this post if we receive a response.
At the time of that quote, of course, you could simply say that all films start off overlong before being trimmed down, that’s just the process of editing a theatrical cut of a movie. But it now seems that there is a distinct possibility the Russos decided that this time around, a bit of indulgence was permitted. Or rather a lot of indulgence was permitted. Three hours in a dark movie theatre surrounded by other people is a lot to ask.
But then again, this is the end of this current chapter of a behemoth movie franchise that has been playing out for 10 long years. In that grand scheme, what’s another three hours?