Last night, during Marvel Studios’ San Diego Comic-Con presentation, boss Kevin Feige declared that—as of this weekend—Avengers: Endgame will overtake the $2.7897 million box office record set by Avatar. It seemed a little premature, since it would’ve theoretically been possible for Marvel to sell literally zero Endgame tickets today, but it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen since Deadline is already calling this race in Endgame’s favor. The reason Endgame is pulling this off at all is because of a scheme that Marvel came up with back in June to re-release Endgame in theaters as a mysterious “extended cut,” and while Marvel didn’t explicitly come right out and give a justification for it, everyone who pays attention to box office numbers assumed that it had something to do with the fact that Endgame ended its initial run just about $40 million short of Avatar’s record.
Deadline says that insiders didn’t think Endgame would be able to do it, since a big chunk of Avatar’s record came from the international market and foreign countries don’t care about Marvel movies as much as U.S. audiences do, but apparently a nice big box of foreign receipts showed up on Marvel’s doorstop this weekend and made it clear that Cap and his friends would edge out the Pandora cat people by tonight. This will give Endgame the record for biggest box office take of all time, a record that Avatar didn’t really deserve to hold onto forever, but Deadline does note that Avatar 2 will have a chance to take the trophy back when it comes out in 2021—which is extremely optimistic about how much people care about Avatar 2.