After ‘Avengers Endgame: Encore,’ Infinity Vision Might Turn Out to Be a Thing

Just over half of the $26 million the Marvel re-release earned from opening weekend came from Disney's special theater designation.

Disney is surely thrilled that over the weekend a movie that is seven years old — the re-release of “Avengers Endgame: Encore” was the No. 1 movie in America, grossing $26 million. But the number it’s really excited about is $13.5 million, which is how much “Endgame: Encore” took in on Infinity Vision screens.

As a reminder, “Infinity Vision” is the new branding Disney has bestowed upon theater screens it deems to be up to its own certain audio and visual standards. It is not a specific format, nor necessarily a so-called Premium Large Format (PLF) screen, and it is certainly not IMAX. The whole reason Infinity Vision exists is because “Avengers: Doomsday” won’t be playing on IMAX screens when it opens on December 18. Those are reserved for “Dune: Part Three,” which opens on the same day and was shot on IMAX cameras, giving the return to Arrakis dibs over Disney and Marvel‘s latest superhero extravaganza.

So Disney wants to lay the groundwork for “Doomsday” by establishing the idea that Infinity Vision is still something special, that it’s still an event worth leaving the house to see a movie in, and that it’s not “less than” IMAX (even if the powers that be at IMAX and Denis Villeneuve would beg to differ). That’s part of the thinking behind making “Avengers Endgame: Encore” the first movie Disney is releasing in Infinity Vision before it stakes everything on its biggest release of the year with “Avengers: Doomsday.”

“Endgame: Encore” opened on over 3,000 screens and had over 1,300 of them that ended up being certified as up to Infinity Vision standards. That means people who bought tickets to “Endgame: Encore” all saw that Infinity Vision logo designation next to the showtime and chose that theater and showtime over another option. The $13.5 million it made from those screens was 52 percent of the box office from just 43 percent of the screens.

Perhaps those ratios seem obvious; just about half the money from a little less than half the screens. But if you ask Disney, those numbers are exactly what they want to see and evidence that the branding will have an impact when “Doomsday” opens. There’s signs too that they can and will keep rolling this out again for potentially another film (no other movies are currently scheduled to open in Infinity Vision).

“I think we’re all going to learn more about this,” Andrew Cripps, Disney’s head of theatrical distribution, told IndieWire. “This is the first time out for Infinity Vision. We have marketed it, and we’ve had our exhibitor partners very engaged with this. If you go on the ticketing websites, there’s Infinity Vision banners on them. We’ve set up an Infinity Vision website with frequently asked questions so people can understand. But as you know, it takes a while to launch a brand and a new concept. So hopefully over time, people will become familiar with it and seek out Infinity Vision theaters.”

Part of the strategy with Infinity Vision was to make those tickets available for pre-sale first before all the standard tickets went on sale, so those core fans who want to see the film as soon as possible are also doing so with the knowledge that they’re picking higher-quality screens. That early access also gives exhibitors an incentive to get their screens certified. To that end, Cripps says at least two circuits are making active pushes to get their screens upgraded in order to become certified Infinity Vision, including several Cinemark screens in Latin America that are pushing to upgrade their theaters to Dolby 7.1 audio.

In terms of what it means for “Doomsday,” IndieWire previously reported that a large chunk of the $50 million it already brought in via pre-sales have been on Infinity Vision screens, and that split is currently 73 percent of all “Doomsday” pre-sales. “Endgame: Encore” even had a few IMAX screens that “Doomsday” will not have, so the split for Infinity Vision on “Doomsday,” though on far more screens, could even be greater than what it brought in for “Endgame: Encore.”

“We want those first audiences to see it in the best possible environment, and the fact that they’re snapping up the biggest and best screens is a very positive thing,” Cripps said.

It’s also worth noting that many of these Infinity Vision screens do not come with an added surcharge. Disney doesn’t dictate those prices, it’s only an upcharge if the exhibitor already classified it as one of their PLF screens. Infinity Vision too is also not anti-IMAX, despite what might have looked like a move directly in response to them, but several Disney titles for next year are already confirmed for IMAX releases. So it really is just a designation that Disney considers these screens up to snuff, and the hope for Disney is that exhibitors will keep playing ball with other tentpole releases and that maybe even other studios decide to lean on the branding should it prove effective.

“Long-term expectations are still evolving,” Cripps said. “We’ll learn with every release that we have. We’re doing a deep dive with all of our markets around the world, and with our exhibitor partners, and we will we will get to a good place with all of this.”