As the weeks rolled on, it became increasingly clear that “Avengers: Endgame” had a chance to do the unthinkable; defeat “Avatar.” James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi smash amassed nearly $2.79 billion in its original run to become the biggest movie in history. For years, it seemed like that number was straight-up untouchable, particularly when “The Force Awakens” topped out at $2.07 billion. However, Marvel’s crowd-pleasing finale to the first three phases of the MCU was reaching global audiences in a way not even a galaxy far, far away could.
Come late July 2019, it finally happened. Disney announced that “Endgame” had, indeed, surpassed “Avatar.” Cameron, for his part, took losing the record quite well. In a September 2019 interview, the filmmaker explained that “Endgame” doing what it did gave him a lot of hope in making his “Avatar” sequels.
“It gives me a lot of hope. ‘Avengers: Endgame’ is demonstrable proof that people will still go to movie theaters. The thing that scared me most about making ‘Avatar 2’ and ‘Avatar 3’ was that the market might have shifted so much that it simply was no longer possible to get people that excited about going and sitting in a dark room with a bunch of strangers to watch something…”
All told, “Avengers: Endgame” pulled in $858.3 million domestically to go with $1.941 billion internationally for a grand total of $2.799 billion globally. It was, for a time, the biggest movie in the history of movies. In an odd bit of poetry, Cameron had the last laugh as a re-release of “Avatar” in China in 2021 once again made it the highest-grossing movie ever, with a new running total of $2.92 billion.
Even so, what “Endgame” managed to do was nothing shy of a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. Particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic, it’s almost hard to think back to a time when so many people rallied around the experience of seeing a movie together in theaters. It was Marvel’s finest hour and remains the MCU’s crowning achievement.
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