The superhero film broke box-office records, taking in $1.2 billion worldwide, and led to gridlock at the multiplexes in a fragmented era of streaming.
LOS ANGELES — Audiences have splintered into a million personalized subsets. Streaming services are sprouting like mushrooms. Attention spans are now measured in seconds.
For those reasons and others — a decade of stagnant attendance, studios that only seem to make sequels of sequels (of sequels) — movie theaters are seen as a dying business. Why trudge to a theater when Netflix is available in your pocket anytime you want?
Yet almost every multiplex on the planet was gridlocked over the weekend. “Avengers: Endgame” took in $1.2 billion worldwide, arriving as the No. 1 movie in at least 54 countries. The euphorically reviewed movie collected a record-breaking $350 million in the United States and Canada, zooming past “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015), which had opening-weekend sales of $248 million, or about $270 million in today’s dollars.
“It shows the power of theaters — the ability, even in a hyper-fragmented culture, to deliver that wildly big communal experience,” Megan Colligan, president of Imax Filmed Entertainment, said in an interview.
[Read our review of “Avengers: Endgame.”| Catch up on all the M. C. U. movies in two minutes.| Analyze the character makeovers in “Endgame.”]
It also shows that Hollywood is increasingly reliant on spectacle to jolt people away from Facebook, Fortnite, Hulu and Netflix and into movie theaters.
All kinds of movies used to break through at the box office. In 1998, the top 10 grossing movies of the year included an Oscar-nominated war epic (“Saving Private Ryan”), three comedies, a couple of science-fiction extravaganzas (“Armageddon”), the comedic drama “Patch Adams” and a smattering of family films (“Dr. Doolittle”). Last year, there were no comedies and only one drama: “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which doubled as a musical. Big-budget fantasies and animated movies took up eight slots.
When the industry’s new strategy works, it works big.
Demand for “Avengers: Endgame” was so astronomical over the weekend that AMC Theaters, the largest multiplex operator in North America, added 5,000 last-minute showtimes in the United States, lifting its total number to more than 63,000. Nineteen AMC locations played the film around the clock. On Saturday alone, 2.3 million people turned up at AMC cinemas.
“Young moviegoers will remember where they were when they saw ‘Endgame,’ who they saw it with and what it felt like,” John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, wrote in an email. “That will pay off for years to come in the same way that moviegoers who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s still talk about the impact that ‘Star Wars’ had on them.
