Early this week, the internet started buzzing with excitement over the prospect of a three-hour long edit for Avengers: Endgame. The climactic conclusion to this version of The Avengers set up the stakes for our final battles. With much of the future MCU sidelined after being dusted, we’re down to some of our core characters. With contracts expiring and some actors wrapping up more than ten years as characters in the Marvel stable, the large and expanded universe was cut back down to size. This will be the last hurrah for the team, but that doesn’t mean that the Russo Brothers are going to short change us.
With just two and a half months until the release of Endgame, the Russos seemed to have tipped the potential runtime. It looks like the latest Avengers adventure will tip over the three-hour mark.
Joe Russo explained to Collider:
“I think the studio is down with what the best story is. Right now, we think the movie is playing well and we’ve had great responses from our test audiences and we’re feeling very good about where it is. We’re still doing work to it. We’re not done with it. Again, this is a culmination film of 22 movies, it’s a lot of storytelling to work into it. Emotion is an intrinsic part of that to us. When you have to tell a really complicated story and you want strong emotional moments with the characters, it just requires a certain amount of real estate. This one, in particular, feels like three hours worth of real estate.”
Ultimately, what this means is that our favorite characters that we’ve grown to love will get the grandiose farewell they deserve. It seems likely we are heading for some legitimate character deaths this time around. It seems likely this will be a big movie for Cap (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) in particular. This could actually mirror a certain comic event particularly well if the Russos play their cards rights.
In the storyline where “The Cancer-verse” opened up, Thanos had to be defeated by two heroes. After directing Thanos to an alternate universe, Starlord and Nova sacrificed themselves to save the universe of heroes. It was an epic event and could be repurposed for this story. We won’t even need the alternate universe to tell this story. Just take the basic outline and roll with it. With Chris Hemsworth likely to continue on, and Scarlett Johanson likely getting her own solo adventure, some of the OG Avengers need to survive. Letting Cap and Iron Man would be the most narratively fulfilling, and we are going to need all three hours to complete the epic story.
