Avengers: Endgame a winner for some, a Thor point for others

North American theatres have stopped showing other movies just to get Avengers: Endgame on as many screens as possible

Chris Hemsworth as Thor in Avengers: Endgame. Picture: Marvel Studios

Disney superheroes are muscling the competition out of the multiplex. Walt Disney’s Avengers: Endgame is one of the most anticipated movies of the year and Holly­wood is expecting a blockbuster opening.

So much so that some recent releases are being pushed off screens around the world to make way for the Marvel Studios juggernaut. This opening weekend, Avengers: Endgame will play in more than 4600 theatres in the US and Canada, the widest release ever, according to box-office data firm Comscore.

Box-office analysts say the movie is likely to set a record opening weekend gross, with the potential to hit $US300 million ($427.5m) in its first four days in North America.

That is great news for Disney, but presents a thorny supply-and-demand issue for theatres. Disney, on the strength of franchises such as its Marvel superheroes and Star Wars series, has been on an unprecedented winning streak at the box office. As a result, hardly any theatre can afford to turn down a Disney movie these days, giving the studio leverage in demanding how long its movies play and how much of the ticket sales flow back to the studio.

In its first week of presales on Fandango, the leading ticketing service, Avengers: Endgame — the culmination of 21 Marvel Studios blockbusters — has sold five times as many tickets as did its predecessor, last year’s Avengers: Infinity War. Infinity War opened to $US258m in April last year and went on to collect $US679m, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing movie of all time in the US and Canada.

For Endgame, with a run time of more than three hours, theatre operators are scheduling around-the-clock screenings to accommodate demand, and many multiplex operators report they plan to dedicate at least half their auditoriums to the movie.

The nation’s largest chain, AMC Entertainment Holdings, saw its stock rise about 10 per cent earlier this month on news of the Avengers presale record. AMC said 17 of its locations would stay open throughout the night to screen the movie in its first 72 hours of release.

Recent releases such as Disney’s Dumbo and the Stephen King adaptation Pet Sematary, which in a usual month would be wrapping up their runs with a final couple of weekends, are likely to lose screens to Avengers. April duds such as the comic-book adaptation Hellboy and animated comedy Missing Link may end up playing for a mere two weeks in some locations.

“If it were any other movie besides Avengers opening, they’d hang around another week or two,” said Gabriel Saluan, owner of Atlas Cinemas, a six-theatre circuit in northeast Ohio. Of his 63 screens, about three-quarters will be playing Avengers: Endgame on its opening weekend. At his 16-plex locations, Mr Saluan estimates 13 auditoriums will show the movie on opening weekend.

“Shazam, Hellboy, Little, Pet Sematary — a lot of the old stuff that’s been around two, three weeks, we’re just dumping them,” he said.

The movie, which analysts estimate will probably top $US700m domestically, is effectively a one-picture stimulus package for theatres such as Mr Saluan’s. He is adding six hours a day of payroll expenses so he can open his theatres for early screenings and go late into the night. He has also ordered more than double the supply of popcorn.

Nearly all major studio releases are guaranteed a minimum of two weeks’ play time in a theatre, no matter how poorly the first week goes. So The Curse of La Llorona, a horror movie released by Warner Bros last Friday, is likely to weather the Avengers: Endgame storm better than most, because theatres won’t be able to drop it for at least another week.

Disney, on the other hand, often secures a guaranteed three-week run on its biggest releases.

Its dominance at the box office is a particularly sensitive topic among theatre owners. The ­studio’s slate is among the most lucrative in recent Hollywood history, with new sequels to Toy Story and Frozen coming before Star Wars: Episode IX in December. But exhibitors have griped about the onerous demands Disney can issue.

The Avengers: Endgame release comes just weeks after Disney closed its $US71.3 billion acquisition of Twentieth Century Fox’s entertainment assets. Disney was already dominant before Fox, but the acquisition — and its expanded slate of releases — prompted some theatre owners to mention it as a concern to the US Department of Justice, which is reviewing antitrust laws.

“Something as dominant as Disney and Avengers, they rule,” Mr Saluan said.

“Other studios beg for scraps.”