Avengers: Endgame Encore tops the box office on 7% of its 2019 opening

Avengers: Endgame took $157,461,641 on its first Friday in April 2019. On Friday it took $11.2m.

Both figures include Thursday previews, so the comparison holds without adjustment: Disney's re-release is running at 7.1 per cent of the original, and 7.1 per cent was enough to be the biggest film in America.

Avengers: Endgame Encore opened on 3,060 screens on 25 September and is heading for about $26m across the weekend, Variety reported. It is ahead of three wide openings and one holdover: A24's Primetime on $20.5m, the second weekend of Sony's Resident Evil on roughly $23.5m, Paramount's Heart of the Beast on $20m, and Forgotten Island from Universal and DreamWorks Animation on $11.5m. Four films at or above $20m in the last week of September is the sort of weekend Deadline has spent the morning calling unusual, and it is.

A seven-year-old film is outselling everything new in the market. That is the line running everywhere today. The more useful fact is that Disney has done exactly this before, on the same weekend of the calendar, with precisely the same number of days to spare, and it went considerably worse.

The Avatar rehearsal

On 23 September 2022, Disney put Avatar back into 1,860 American cinemas with footage from Avatar: The Way of Water attached. It took $10,529,576 and finished third, behind Don't Worry Darling on $19,353,213 and The Woman King on $11,004,516, according to Box Office Mojo's chart for that weekend. The re-release played for ten days and ended at $24,714,024.

Endgame Encore will pass that by Sunday teatime.

Here is the part nobody has laid out. Avatar returned on Friday 23 September 2022, and The Way of Water opened on Friday 16 December 2022: 84 days. Endgame Encore returned on Friday 25 September 2026, and Avengers: Doomsday opens on Friday 18 December 2026: 84 days. Twelve weeks to the day, twice, four years apart, from the same company. That is not coincidence. It is a release calendar with a rule written into it.

The rule worked last time. The Way of Water opened to $134.1m domestically and $441.7m worldwide, Boxoffice Pro reported, and finished its run on $2,334,484,620.

What $26m actually buys

Per screen, the gap between the two experiments is wider than the totals make it look. Avatar averaged $5,661 a cinema across that 2022 weekend. Endgame Encore is averaging around $8,497, half as much again, on a film that has been available to own at home since 2019 and sits on Disney+ tonight.

The Thursday multiple points the same way. Previews took $3.8m, LaughingPlace reported, and Friday came in at 2.9 times that figure. Nostalgia alone does not hold a Friday like that, and it does not bring in the people who stayed home on Thursday night. Something else is selling.

That something is four minutes long. The Encore cut adds four new scenes leading into Doomsday, per Variety, featuring Robert Downey Jr as Doctor Doom, Tom Hiddleston's Loki and Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner, plus a new ending in which Loki arrives at the door of Chris Evans's Steve Rogers and Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter.

Call it what it is. This is a trailer with a ticket price attached, and Disney is being paid eight figures to run its own advertisement on 3,060 screens for as long as it cares to keep the booking. No studio will run a cheaper marketing campaign this year, because this one has a positive cost.

One more piece of arithmetic, for scale. Endgame finished its original American run on $858,373,000 from a widest release of 4,662 cinemas, and its worldwide total of $2.799bn still ranks second on the all-time chart. This weekend adds about 3 per cent of that domestic figure in three days, seven years late.

The rest of the market, which had a good weekend anyway

Primetime is the one to watch. A24 made Robert Pattinson's film about Chris Hansen during the To Catch a Predator years for $15m and opened it to $20.5m from 2,874 locations, without a single Harkins screen. The chain pulled every A24 title from its 33 cinemas last week in a row over film rental terms, which we went through in detail. A24 has now had the best new opening of the weekend while one of its circuits is refusing to book it, which weakens the exhibitors' position considerably. The B CinemaScore against 87 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes is the split that subject matter was always going to produce.

Heart of the Beast and Forgotten Island both cost $80m, TheWrap reports. David Ayer's Alaskan survival film with Brad Pitt opened to $20m on an A minus CinemaScore. The DreamWorks Animation title opened to $11.5m on an A and 94 per cent, which is a very good set of scores attached to a very ordinary number, and it will need every weekday between now and half term to justify the budget.

A correction to our own file while we are here. When Resident Evil opened last weekend we followed the Saturday estimate of a little over $50m. The actual, in the Wikipedia record of 2026 number-one films, was $60,152,878. Zach Cregger's reboot was better than the Saturday projections said, including ours, and its second weekend is down about 61 per cent, which is roughly what a front-loaded horror opening does.

Weekend actuals land on Monday. Avengers: Doomsday opens on 18 December, 84 days after Friday, and the number Disney is quietly measuring this whole exercise against is $2,334,484,620.