Avengers: Endgame reclaims title of highest-grossing film, overtaking Avatar again

LOS ANGELES — Marvel Studios' "Avengers: Endgame" has reclaimed its title as the highest-grossing film in box-office history, edging past James Cameron's "Avatar" for the second time since the two franchises began trading the record in 2019. The shift, confirmed by multiple box-office tracking services over the weekend, was driven not by a new movie but by a limited theatrical re-release, "Avengers: Endgame Encore," that Walt Disney Studios and Marvel put into theaters on September 25 as a promotional bridge to December's "Avengers: Doomsday."

By October 2, running tallies kept by The Numbers put "Endgame's" worldwide total at $2,925,499,985, narrowly ahead of the $2,923,710,708 that Box Office Mojo credits to "Avatar" across its original run and subsequent re-releases. The gap is small enough — various trackers put it at $1 million to $4 million — that the lead could still move as final grosses from the past week are reconciled.

The numbers

The margin owes almost entirely to "Endgame Encore," a 185-minute cut of the 2019 film — four minutes longer than the original release — that Marvel built around new introductory material, previously unseen footage and a post-credits scene tying into "Doomsday." According to The Numbers' breakdown, the re-release has added $36.2 million to "Endgame's" domestic total since its debut, helping push the film's overall domestic gross to $894.6 million against $2.03 billion internationally.

• "Endgame" worldwide lifetime gross (The Numbers, Oct. 2): $2,925,499,985
• "Avatar" worldwide lifetime gross (Box Office Mojo): $2,923,710,708
• "Endgame Encore" opening weekend, Sept. 25-27: about $26 million domestic, $86 million worldwide
• "Endgame Encore" second weekend, Oct. 2-4: roughly $18 million worldwide, per tracking estimates

That opening was large enough that outlets including Deadline described it as among the biggest global openings ever recorded for a theatrical re-release, trailing only the 2012 3-D reissue of "Titanic." By its second weekend, "Endgame Encore" had slipped out of the domestic top five, overtaken by new entries including the thriller "Verity" and the Brad Pitt survival picture "Heart of the Beast," even as its cumulative worldwide total kept climbing.

A rivalry that has swapped the record twice before

This is not the first time the two films have changed places. "Endgame" first overtook "Avatar" in July 2019, only for "Avatar" to reclaim the record in March 2021 after a surprise re-release in China added enough to push its total to roughly $2.802 billion against "Endgame's" $2.797 billion at the time. The current turn is the first since then, and it comes with an added wrinkle: Disney now controls the theatrical and marketing rights to both films, having acquired 20th Century Fox and its Avatar franchise in 2019, the same year "Endgame" first set the record. Pages for both films remain live on the studio's own site, including Marvel's page for "Avengers: Endgame" and its page for "Avengers: Doomsday," the film the re-release is designed to promote.

A re-release built as a bridge to 'Doomsday'

Marvel has been explicit that "Endgame Encore" is less a nostalgia play than marketing for "Doomsday," which opens December 18 and is intended to relaunch the Avengers line after a stretch of softer box-office results for Marvel's Multiverse Saga. The re-release played in IMAX and in theaters certified under Infinity Vision, a new premium-large-format standard that The Walt Disney Company announced in April, requiring screens at least 45 feet wide with laser projection and immersive audio. More than 75 domestic and 300 global screens had been certified by the time "Endgame Encore" opened, according to the studio, which said the program was designed "to help audiences identify superior theatrical experiences" ahead of "Doomsday's" arrival.

"Disney's standards for production quality are second to none, with every single detail of a film finely tuned for an immersive experience," Andrew Cripps, head of theatrical distribution for The Walt Disney Studios, said when the certification launched.

"It's a critical companion story" to "Doomsday," Joe Russo, who directed "Endgame" with his brother Anthony and is directing "Doomsday" as well, said of the re-release ahead of its release.

The approach follows a pattern set by "Titanic" and by "Avatar" itself, both of which used limited theatrical re-releases to pad their all-time totals years after their original runs. What is new is the degree to which Marvel built the re-release around footage meant to set up a different, forthcoming film — including a post-credits scene involving Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom, the villain at the center of "Doomsday" — rather than simply reformatting the old one for 3-D or a higher frame rate.

Who is affected, and what comes next

For Disney, the record is more bragging rights than a meaningful line on a balance sheet; both films were long since profitable many times over. For theater chains, the re-release has been a welcome, if modest, addition to a fall box office otherwise dominated by new openers. For box-office analysts, the swap is a reminder that the "record" is an estimate maintained by competing tracking services rather than an audited figure certified by any single body, which is part of why outlets including WDW News Today have reported the margin slightly differently even while agreeing on the overall outcome.

Neither Disney nor Lightstorm Entertainment, James Cameron's production company and the steward of the "Avatar" franchise, issued a statement responding directly to the new tally. Attention in the industry has already shifted to December 18, when "Doomsday" opens with a cast built around Downey's turn as the villain Victor von Doom, alongside Chris Hemsworth, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Florence Pugh, Vanessa Kirby and Pedro Pascal in a story meant to merge the Avengers with the newly introduced Fantastic Four. Some analysts have floated opening-weekend projections approaching $1 billion globally for "Doomsday," a number that, if realized, would make the current "Endgame"-"Avatar" margin look trivial within weeks. A sequel, "Avengers: Secret Wars," is already scheduled for the following year, and a further "Avatar" sequel from Cameron remains in production, meaning the all-time record could plausibly change hands again more than once before the end of the decade.