Avengers: Endgame Encore Becomes the First Re-Release to Top the Box Office Since 2011

Avengers: Endgame Encore, a theatrical return of Disney and Marvel's 2019 blockbuster with previously unreleased footage, topped the North American box office for the weekend of September 25 to 27, 2026, grossing $26 million from 3,060 theaters. A further $60 million from international markets lifted the global total to $86 million, the second-biggest worldwide re-release ever behind only the 2012 3D reissue of Titanic, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

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The win is unusual for a catalog title. Wikipedia's list of 2026 box office number-one films in the United States lists Encore as the first re-release to lead the domestic chart since The Lion King 3D in 2011. The Box Office Mojo weekend chart and USA Today both confirm the No. 1 finish.

Reissues normally open on a few hundred screens and vanish within days. This one ran wide, in more than 3,000 locations, and finished ahead of four new wide releases. Its scale is what makes the weekend worth reading closely.

Why a re-release winning matters

Studios use re-releases for two jobs: to earn a little more from a film that already had its run, and to remind audiences a franchise still exists. The first job rarely justifies a wide footprint. Endgame Encore shows the second job can.

The original Endgame opened in April 2019 to a record-setting $1.2 billion global opening weekend and finished with $2.7 billion worldwide, still No. 2 on the all-time worldwide chart, per The Hollywood Reporter. Seven years later, the film still carries enough pull to anchor a weekend in late September, a stretch of the calendar that is normally quiet.

That matters to theater owners, who get a familiar title with a built-in audience during a month with few of them. It matters to Disney, which gets a paid marketing event for a film that has not opened yet. And it matters as a data point for the rest of the industry: if a seven-year-old Marvel film can lead a frame, the bar for a successful theatrical re-release is higher than it was.

A soft weekend gave it room

Encore's win also reflects what it was up against. The weekend's biggest new release opened to about $20 million, and the No. 2 film was a holdover in its second frame. On a calendar with a major tentpole, a seven-year-old re-release would not have led.

The historical comparison is instructive. Most of the films that topped the domestic chart in 2026 did so on opening weekends worth well over $100 million, according to Wikipedia's running list. Encore reached No. 1 with a fraction of that, which says as much about a frame no studio treated as a priority as it does about the film's own pull.

That does not make the result meaningless. Studios schedule for the calendar they have, and a distributor that spots an open weekend can profit from it. Disney turned a lull into a headline.

The premium-format math behind the number

About 52 percent of the domestic gross came from "Infinity Vision" premium large-format screens, a newly launched certification, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Premium large format, or PLF, covers the bigger, brighter and louder auditoriums that charge more per ticket than a standard screen.

A re-release that earns more than half its money from those seats is doing two things at once. It is selling fewer but more expensive tickets, and it is giving exhibitors their highest-margin product. The same weekend's wide releases did not lean on those screens to the same degree, which suggests Encore was positioned as a premium event rather than a catalog filler.

The phrase "certification" is the detail to note. Infinity Vision is not a single chain's brand but a label applied across participating auditoriums, which lets Disney market a consistent experience without owning the hardware. That packaging is part of why a 2019 film could be sold as something worth leaving the house for in 2026.

Exhibitors have pushed premium screens for years because the margin on a single ticket is far higher than on a standard seat. A re-release that steers half its audience into those rooms is therefore welcome in a way that a standard catalog run is not, and it helps explain why theaters gave Encore 3,060 screens in the first place.

A trailer for Doomsday, sold as a ticket

Encore includes an exclusive look at Marvel Studios' Avengers: Doomsday, which opens on December 18, 2026, and the extra footage continues to build momentum ahead of that release, per The Hollywood Reporter.

Putting a coming attraction behind a paid ticket is a well-worn move, but the numbers here are large enough to treat the re-release as a marketing line item rather than a revenue one. If the Encore run does nothing but convert existing fans into early awareness for Doomsday, Disney still comes out ahead.

The timing is deliberate. A trailer attached to a re-release reaches the most committed part of an audience, the people willing to buy a ticket for a film they have already seen. Those are the viewers most likely to talk about Doomsday in the months before it opens, and word of mouth is the currency a December release needs.

Box office analyst David A. Gross, who publishes the FranchiseRe newsletter, framed the size of the result against the norm. "Re-releases rarely earn more than $10 million," he told Variety. "As a marketing exercise, [this] is an effective way to build early word-of-mouth."

That comparison sets the ceiling most reissues hit. Encore cleared it by a wide margin, which is the strongest single argument that the format was chosen for promotion as much as for ticket sales.

Where the money came from

The domestic figure was the smaller half of the story. The $60 million international haul was more than double the $26 million from North America, a split that reflects how Marvel films travel. The original Endgame earned the bulk of its $2.7 billion outside the United States, and the re-release followed the same pattern.

A re-release rarely gets a coordinated global rollout. That Encore did suggests Disney treated it as a worldwide event rather than a domestic catalog exercise, and it helps explain how the $86 million total landed where it did on the all-time re-release chart.

The rest of a crowded chart

Encore did not win by default. Four new films and one strong holdover filled out the frame, and the gap at the top was narrow.

• Sony's Resident Evil held No. 2 with about $23.3 million domestically in its second frame, crossing $100 million. Its domestic total reached $103.4 million and its global total $196.5 million against a $75 million budget, per Variety.
• Paramount's Brad Pitt survival film Heart of the Beast opened to about $20 million domestic and $50.1 million worldwide.
• A24's Primetime, with Robert Pattinson playing the To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen, opened to about $19.1 million to $19.2 million, the third-best opening in the studio's history. About 69 percent of its audience was under 30.
• DreamWorks Animation's Forgotten Island opened to $12.8 million.

The spread is healthy. A holdover, a star-driven thriller, an indie awards play and an animated family film all found audiences in the same three days, which is not always true in a weekend dominated by one title.

A market running ahead of last year

The overall domestic frame was about $122.3 million, up about 10.6 percent weekend-on-weekend and about 58.5 percent year-on-year, per The Hollywood Reporter. The 2026 domestic box office stood at about $7.8 billion, nearing $8 billion earlier in the year than it did in 2025.

Studios are benefiting. Universal became the first studio to cross $5 billion at the 2026 global box office, helped by The Odyssey and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, per The Hollywood Reporter.

A single re-release does not drive a market. But a year that is already running ahead of the previous one gives exhibitors room to experiment with formats and event screenings, because the downside of a miss is smaller. Encore is what that experimentation looks like when it works.

The limits of the model

It is easy to overread one weekend. Endgame is close to a best-case candidate: a film with a devoted base, a sequel to promote and a premium-format hook. Most catalog titles have none of those.

The $10 million rule Gross described still applies to the field. A studio that tries to copy this playbook with a smaller franchise will likely find that the audience is not there at 3,000 locations, and the cost of a wide reissue is not zero. Prints, marketing and screen space all have a price, and a film that opens to a few million dollars can leave theaters worse off than a quiet limited run.

There is also a question of how much the Doomsday preview, rather than the film itself, drove attendance. If a meaningful share of buyers came for the trailer, the same approach could wear out as audiences learn they can watch the footage online within days. Disney has not broken out how many tickets were sold specifically for the extra material.

Encore's $86 million worldwide places it second on the all-time re-release list, but the gap to Titanic 3D's 2012 run is the reminder that one strong weekend does not make a trend. The record still belongs to an older film, from an older era of 3D pricing.

What to watch

Three things will show whether this weekend was a format milestone or a one-off.

The first is whether Encore holds in its second and third frames. A premium-format event tends to front-load, so a steep drop would suggest curiosity rather than repeat demand. The second is whether other studios schedule wide re-releases for late 2026 and early 2027, which would turn a single result into a strategy. The third is Doomsday itself. Its December 18 opening will be the clearest test of whether the Encore campaign actually moved awareness, though the film was always going to be a major release regardless.

For now, the fact stands on its own. A re-release led the North American box office for the first time since 2011, and it did so on premium screens, with a trailer attached, in a month that usually belongs to nobody.

Cover: Fans in Marvel costumes at the first screening event for Avengers: Endgame in Tokyo. Photo by Dick Thomas Johnson via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.