Avengers: Endgame Retakes Avatar’s Worldwide Box Office Record
October 4, 2026 estimates put Endgame at $2.9255 billion worldwide, narrowly ahead of Avatar. Its Encore rerelease also connects the Infinity Saga finale to Avengers: Doomsday.
The short answer: October 4, 2026 estimates put Endgame at $2.9255 billion worldwide, narrowly ahead of Avatar. Its Encore rerelease also connects the Infinity Saga finale to Avengers: Doomsday.
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Avengers: Endgame moved back ahead of Avatar by a narrow margin: an estimated $2.9255 billion worldwide against $2.9237 billion. Those totals, announced October 4, 2026, put Endgame back on top of the all-time global box office following the theatrical rerelease Avengers Endgame: Encore. But Encore does more than add to the film’s ticket sales: its new scenes help connect the conclusion of the Infinity Saga to Avengers: Doomsday.
The two films have traded this position before. As TheWrap recalled in its October 16 report, Endgame overtook Avatar in July 2019, before Avatar reclaimed the lead with its 2021 rerelease. The outlet also reported that Avatar director James Cameron had again congratulated Marvel, welcoming Encore’s success in bringing audiences to theaters.
What Encore adds
Encore is a theatrical rerelease with new material, not simply another run of the original film. TheWrap reported on September 28 that directors Joe and Anthony Russo added four scenes to help prepare viewers for Avengers: Doomsday. The return to theaters therefore serves two purposes: revisiting the 2019 film and setting up the story ahead.
The filmmakers also worked to make the additions fit. According to TheWrap, the Russos used the same lighting, lenses and sets as the earlier production to integrate footage shot years later. The report quoted Anthony Russo describing a central motivation for Encore: looking back at Endgame while thinking about how to move forward.
From the Infinity Saga to Doomsday
Endgame brought together more than a decade of Marvel Cinematic Universe storytelling to conclude the Infinity Saga. For Anthony Russo, that ending also became the place to begin developing the next Avengers story. In Disney’s October 4 announcement, he explained how the connection emerged:
Many years later, as we started to conceive a road forward that would evolve into Doomsday, it just begged of us: ‘You really need to pick the story up from where you left it in Endgame,’ Anthony Russo, quoted in Disney’s October 4, 2026 announcement
Doomsday will bring together the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Talokan, the Thunderbolts, the Wakandans and the X-Men. Encore’s additions provide a connection to that broader gathering through the film that closed the Infinity Saga—a continuation the Russos have chosen to build from Endgame’s original stopping point.