AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR Co-Director Joe Russo Teases That The Film Might Be Marvel's Longest Yet
While Anthony skipped SDCC this year to continue work on Avengers: Infinity War, Joe Russo disclosed how long the current cut of the film clocks in at and says it might get even longer.
Upon exiting Marvel's SDCC panel on Saturday night, Avengers: Infinity War co-director Joe Russo spoke with Collider about the current runtime for the film. Per the elder Russo, Infinity War is currently slated to be one of the longest entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “The current cut is over two and a half [hours]… Most of it’s a movie you could show, but there’s still a lot of work left to be done, I still have a couple of scenes that we haven’t finished from Avengers 3 that I’m shooting in the next few months with my brother, and it’s certainly gonna be a film that lives in the two and a half hour, two and a half hour-plus range.”
Speaking to those who might feel 2 hrs+ is too long for a film, Russo says Marvel has earned that amount of time with the epic build-up across 10 years of superhero cinema. "We have to, I mean it’s a culmination event. We’ve gotta take 10 years of storytelling in this Marvel narrative experiment that’s been going on since Iron Man, and we have to take all these disparate tones, disparate themes, motivations, and we have to pull them together in a unified narrative and write the final chapters of the book. There’s no way you could do that with all these characters in under that running length."
When the conversation turned to whether Avengers 4 would be just as long as Infinity War, Joe shied away from giving a definitive answer, stating that it's too early to tell. "It’s hard to say because we haven’t shot it yet, but I think again because these are complex movies with a lot of characters, it’s hard to imagine—now look at me I’ll look like an idiot in a couple of months when it’s two hours and twenty minutes, but it’s hard to imagine these movies being short films."
Presently, Captain America: Civil War (another Russo-directed pic) is the MCU's longest film, clocking in at 2hrs 28 minutes. Avengers: Infinity War is currently scheduled to hit theaters on May 4, 2018. Avengers 4 arrives the following year on May 3, 2019.