Avengers: Endgame was a cultural phenomenon that filmmakers Anthony and Joe Russo know they will never top.
Let us set the scene. It’s April 2019, and it has been a year since Avengers: Infinity War left you with a million unanswered questions about the culmination of a decade of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You count the days until the movie’s continuation, Avengers: Endgame, finally hits theaters. You’re dreading the prospect that one of your favorite heroes might die, but you cannot wait to see Thanos finally defeated.
Once the day finally comes, the audience cheers and roars like it’s a real-life fight they’re witnessing, and the movie breaks Avatar‘s historical box office record.
“It will never happen again,” Joe told Variety, calling the film “an apex of that era of theatrical filmmaking.” He’s not wrong. Endgame grossed $2.798 billion at the box office worldwide, surpassing Infinity War‘s entire theatrical run in just eleven days, and finally surpassing the record held by Avatar for ten years.
The cinema experience has changed massively since Avengers: Endgame came out, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic forced moviegoers to stay home and turn towards smaller screens instead. For the Russo brothers, however, the pandemic only sped up a process that they had seen coming a long time ago. “When we started AGBO [in 2016], we already felt the winds shifting,” they said. AGBO is the brothers’ artist-first independent studio launched in 2017.
Even if the future isn’t in billion-dollar box office releases or memorable theatrical experiences like the ones that took place worldwide with Endgame, Joe and Anthony aren’t scared. “Things are changing fast, which we’re very excited by,” Anthony shared with Variety.
The directing duo calls themselves “futurists” and tech enthusiasts, hoping to “meet the market where it is at that moment,” instead of trying to change trends. “That’s been our agenda from the beginning, and it’s served us very well,” they said.
Marvel’s Phase Four output, which kickstarted after the conclusion of the Infinity Saga in Endgame, hasn’t come close to the 2019 title. Though Spider-Man: No Way Home, which brought all iterations of the silver screen’s Peter Parker together by joining Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland in a festival of nostalgia in 2021, came closest, it finished its theatrical run almost $1 billion short of Endgame.
Another contender could be James Cameron’s sequel to Avatar, which is finally hitting theaters this December, a decade after the first film. The MCU’s next Avengers movie, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, is another possibility when it comes out in 2025.
