A two-weekend "Encore" run added $126 million and pushed Endgame's global haul to $2.92 billion, edging past Avatar just as Avengers: Doomsday gears up for December.
Seven years after it first stole the crown from James Cameron, Avengers: Endgame has taken it back. A limited "Encore" reissue, playing over two weekends, added $126 million to the film's lifetime gross, enough to nudge its global total to $2.92 billion and push it past Avatar's figure of the same number.
The split: $36.2 million domestic, $89.8 million overseas. Not bad for a movie that first hit theatres in 2019. And it isn't just Endgame's own tally that's ballooned. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, counting everything back to 2008's Iron Man, has now crossed $35 billion in franchise box office. That's a number most studios would build a quarterly earnings call around.
The timing isn't an accident. This Encore cut wasn't a straight re-release, it came with a tweaked ending and three new mid and post-credit scenes tied directly to Avengers: Doomsday, which lands in December. According to theatrical sources, Doomsday has already banked close to $60 million in presales, and the appetite for that film is clearly what pulled audiences back into theatres for Endgame one more time.
Disney and Marvel seem to be treating Doomsday less like a sequel rollout and more like an infrastructure moment for the entire exhibition business. The studio's new Infinity Vision campaign is steering moviegoers toward premium formats, and here's the twist: Doomsday won't actually screen on Imax for at least its first three weeks. Exhibitors have told TheWrap they've sped up plans to upgrade sound systems and projectors just to be part of the campaign, and 70% of Doomsday's presales so far have come through Infinity Vision screens rather than standard ones.
A theatre-renovation boom, Marvel-shaped
This is bigger than one franchise flexing for a December release. TheWrap reported last week that Cinema United has tracked $2.7 billion in multiplex refurbishment spending over the past two years, a wave of renovations that lines up neatly with Marvel's biggest bet since Endgame itself first closed out the Infinity Saga.
Whether Endgame holds this record past December is an open question. If Doomsday performs anywhere close to its presale momentum, it could be chasing its own predecessor's number within weeks of release. There's something fitting about that, a franchise competing against its own highlight reel for the top spot.
For now, the record sits with Endgame again, at $2.92 billion and climbing by the margin of a reissue rather than a new film. Avatar held it once, lost it, took it back, and has now lost it a second time. Cameron fans will want a rematch. Marvel just wants December to arrive on schedule, with the infrastructure, the presales and the new ending already in place.
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