Avengers: Endgame Directors Joe And Anthony Russo Confirm Three-Hour Runtime

Marvel fans better get ready to strap themselves down for a long and wild ride because it looks like Avengers: Endgame might actually approach a 3 hour-long runtime.

Sure, the assembly cut of any movie usually gets whittled down by the film's editing team for the final cut that's going to make its way to cinemas, but Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo have been teasing a Marvel movie that could last three hours long.

Now, the directorial duo confirms the stretched run-time for the second installment in their two-part Avengers movie in an interview with Collider. According to Joe, he and his creative team have already screened Endgame to test audiences and so far they've had pretty positive responses.

"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," Joe revealed in the interview with the news outlet. "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."

During its early years, Marvel entries like The Incredible Hulk and Thor: The Dark World would clock in under two hours. Now, the length has increased significantly with films like Captain America: Civil War receiving a runtime lasting 2 hours and 28 minutes. The longest film, of course, is Avengers: Infinity War, clocking in at 2 hours and 40 minutes on the big screen.

Now, with Endgame serving as the closing act to the culmination of the past ten years of the MCU, the Russo's are going full blast.

"This one, in particular, feels like three hours worth of real estate," the director confirmed.

That's an extra twenty minutes of footage where anything can happen – perhaps the success of the Avengers, perhaps the arrival of their sacrifice in their attempt to undo Thanos' massacre.

Avengers: Endgame premieres April 26, 2019.

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