The box office arms race heats up! We’ve reported just how close “Avengers: Endgame” is to taking the global box office record away from “Avatar,” and it was recently revealed that the film will be getting a re-release on June 28 in anticipation of the release of “Spider-Man: Far From Home” on July 2, and surely also in anticipation of grabbing those last few dollars it needs to claim worldwide bragging rights.
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige explained to Screen Rant about the re-release, “There will be a version going into theaters with a bit of a marketing push with a few new things at the end of the movie. If you stay and watch the movie, after the credits, there’ll be a deleted scene, a little tribute, and a few surprises.” Will those special features, plus anticipation for the “Spider-Man” sequel, be enough to entice audiences back into theaters — or perhaps bring in new audiences who haven’t seen “Endgame” yet?
James Cameron‘s “Avatar” was technologically groundbreaking when it was released in 2009 and took in $2.788 billion worldwide. Meanwhile, after its ninth weekend in theaters in 2019 “Endgame” is at $2.749 million, a mere $39 million away from the record. To put that in perspective, “Endgame’s” global haul is only 1.4% less than “Avatar’s” as of this writing.
“Endgame” started huge — bigger than any movie ever, actually, with a $1.2 billion global opening weekend — but it dropped relatively quickly as new blockbusters have crowded into multiplexes over the course of the summer movie season. On the weekend of June 21-23 alone, it lost another 465 screens as “Toy Story 4” entered theaters, bringing it down to 985. Of course, Disney has so much market share at this point that this essentially amounts to a civil war. Marvel Studios is a Disney property, and now so is 20th Century Fox, which released “Avatar.” “Toy Story,” of course, is owned by Disney too. At this rate, in a couple of years time Disney might hold the copyright on the entire concept of money.
