Endgame Encore Is $39M From Dethroning Avatar at the Box Office

Seven years after a snapped gauntlet made a generation cry in darkened theaters, Endgame is number one again. According to Empire, citing Variety reporting, the Endgame Encore re-release assembled an $86 million worldwide opening weekend — $26 million domestic plus $60 million overseas — across 3,060 U.S. theaters. That haul lifts the 2019 film's lifetime global total to $2.885 billion, against Avatar's all-time record of $2.923 billion. What remains is a deficit of roughly thirty-nine million dollars — a margin smaller than many opening weekends. For movies fans who lived through the 2019 record race, the rematch is officially on.

This is not a lazy cash-grab reissue. The Encore ships with four brand-new scenes designed to bridge directly into Avengers: Doomsday, which hits theaters on December 18, 2026, plus an exclusive Doomsday preview that, for now, can only be seen in a theater seat. Anthony Russo, who directed the original alongside his brother Joe, said the team treated the classic with care: "We weren't going to mess with what that movie is," he said, via ComingSoon's coverage of Deadline reporting. Audiences apparently agreed the additions were worth the ticket — the re-release carries a 96 percent Verified Moviegoer score on Rotten Tomatoes.

How close the gap really is

Context matters here, because re-releases almost never move the needle like this. Disney calls it the second-highest global debut ever for a re-release, behind only Titanic 3D's 2012 run. Domestically, the opening ranks third among reissues, trailing the 1997 Star Wars Special Edition ($35.9 million) and The Lion King 3D ($30.2 million) — two benchmarks that have stood for decades. Premium formats did the heavy lifting: Imax accounted for $13.7 million of the worldwide opening, and more than 1,300 Infinity Vision PLF screens delivered about 52 percent of the domestic gross, per Box Office Pro. The studio also crossed a milestone of its own: Marvel's 38 films have now earned a combined $35.075 billion worldwide.

The championship belt: a timeline of the all-time record

The Avatar-Endgame rivalry is now a seventeen-year saga with the plot twists of a franchise film:

2009: Avatar sets the mark at roughly $2.78 billion and holds it for a decade. July 2019: Endgame seizes the crown with $2.797 billion after 89 days in theaters. March 2021: a China re-release returns Avatar to the top, a lead the studio later stretched to $2.923 billion. September 2026: the Endgame Encore push lifted the film to $2.885 billion, closer than it has been in five years.

The question is whether the Encore has the legs to finish the job. The trade notes the crown could change hands "within a week or two if momentum holds" — a real caveat, since re-releases are notoriously front-loaded. But the Encore opened ahead of tracking, unseated a brand-new Resident Evil (down 61 percent in its second frame), and played to the exact audience most likely to come back a second time.

Why Gen Z is paying to watch a movie it already owns

Endgame was the defining theater event of Gen Z's formative years — "I love you 3000," the portals scene, midnight-crowd culture that no streaming premiere has recreated. That is exactly the audience this re-release is built for: the Endgame Encore functions as a paid launch event for the Doomsday generation, with new footage (fan roundups describe Loki, Steve-and-Peggy, Banner, and Doctor Doom material) acting as connective tissue you cannot stream on Disney+. The summer already proved the appetite is real — Spider-Man: Brand New Day's historic run, now the third-highest-grossing film of all time, showed event-hungry young crowds still leave the house.

There is a skeptical read, and it is worth hearing. Marvel re-released Endgame in 2019 partly to edge past Avatar, and critics note this Encore is, functionally, a marketing vehicle for Doomsday with a record-chase narrative attached. There is also a delicious irony, flagged by Empire: after Brand New Day's monster summer, it might be Doomsday itself — not the Encore — that becomes the first $3 billion film and takes the crown anyway. Either way, a record this generation watched get set in 2019 is falling in real time in 2026 — and it could fall twice before the year is out.