Well, Avengers: Endgame Officially Has the Weirdest Test Screening Praise I’ve Ever Heard
There are lots of metrics by which you can judge reactions to a movie, and early reactions carry their own set of considerations, like just who the movie is being shown to specifically, and why.
It’s not surprising that Avengers: Endgame would earn praise from its early test audiences, even if the current cut of the movie is nowhere near what we’ll actually see in theaters. Even if it were screened for a bunch of random people off the street, there’s a solid likelihood that a lot of them would be Marvel fans who would love the movie almost no matter what, and we all know it would have to be pretty terrible for any negative news to slip out of early, Disney-engineered screenings.
No, what’s weird about this particular round of early movie reviews is the specific accomplishment that the Russo brothers directing team proudly explained to Collider: In the first three (of four) test screenings of the movie, “not a single person got up to go to the bathroom.”
Not “people said it was a masterpiece ten years in the making.” Not “everyone agreed this is really going to satisfy the fans!” Not any of the other vague, overly enthusiastic pieces of praise you’d normally expect to hear from a company’s internal test screenings. They’re just happy that everyone was willing to sit through their incredibly, ungodly long movie in one shot—everyone except whoever couldn’t hold it anymore during the fourth screening.
Whether that’s because the movie is just so great or because Mickey Mouse was waiting at the back of the theater to remind any runners that he owns their entire lives and they’d do best to go sit back down, it’s hard to say. Luckily, the movie won’t be quite such an endurance test when it actually hits theaters, so your bladder won’t have to suffer quite as much as these unfortunate test subjects.
As the Russos explained to Collider, the current cut of the movie is still around 3 hours long, which is substantially longer than Avengers: Infinity War’s already lengthy 2 hours and 40 minutes. The good news is that they’ve outright said there’s still editing to be done, along with the fact that test screenings often result in certain sequences being altered or outright removed—that’s kind of the whole point of testing things.
But they did also mention that Disney would be open to a three-hour superhero epic if they thought it was necessary to cap off ten years of the MCU, and the directing duo believes the movie is playing well with the test audiences, having previously mentioned that they expected it to be longer than Infinity War anyway. So, maybe we should be hoping that more people do make for the bathroom in these screenings—unless, that is, you’re into 3-hour movies, in which case this may just be exactly your thing.
(via ComicBook.com, image: Marvel Entertainment)
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