The nine-minute-longer cut with a Doomsday tie-in scene drew decent Friday numbers, but Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia's film edged it out at the counter.
Seven years after it first cleaned up at the box office, Avengers Endgame is back in Indian theatres, and it didn't quite repeat history on day one.
The re-release, branded Avengers Endgame Encore, opened to Rs 7.25 crore net in India on Friday, September 25, according to figures from Sacnilk. That's a solid number for a film audiences have already seen once, twice, maybe a dozen times since 2019. It's also, not enough to top the day's other big release.
The Vvaan, starring Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia, pulled in Rs 8 crore net on the same day. The trade had spent the week wondering whether a returning Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans would eat into the Hindi film's opening. They didn't. If anything, The Vvaan held its ground against a genuine Marvel event.
And Endgame Encore isn't just the old cut with a new poster. The makers have folded in somewhere between four and seven minutes of previously unseen footage, plus an end-credit scene that reportedly links straight into Avengers: Doomsday. For a fanbase that treats every frame of the Infinity Saga like scripture, that's the actual draw here, not nostalgia alone.
The social media noise around the re-release has been loud all week, and distributors will be banking on that translating into a weekend jump rather than a Friday-only spike. Re-releases tend to live or die on word of mouth among people who skipped the first day, so Saturday and Sunday numbers will tell the real story.
The Vvaan, meanwhile, is carrying its own baggage. Reviews have been mixed. CutMirchi's sister assessment at The Free Press Journal gave it 2.5 stars, calling the story interesting and the visuals striking while flagging Deepak Kumar Mishra's direction as the film's weak link, adding that it works best as a one-time watch and mainly for Sidharth Malhotra's fans. Whether that verdict slows the film down over the weekend, or whether it simply doesn't matter, is the open question heading into Saturday.
For Marvel, the bigger prize is further out. Avengers: Doomsday lands in cinemas on December 18, and this re-release, tie-in scene included, is doing double duty as its opening trailer with a three-hour runtime. Whether Indian audiences turn up in the numbers Marvel wants over the next two days will say a lot about how much appetite is left for one more trip back to 2019 before the next one arrives.
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