Endgame Returns Thursday and the Box Office Charts Have Already Made Room for It
Box Office Mojo has already built the row. Every dollar Avengers: Endgame takes from Thursday's re-release will be added to its lifetime total — and the $124.3 million gap to Avatar was never a like-for-like comparison anyway.
Avengers: Endgame returns to cinemas on Thursday 25 September. Box Office Mojo's page for the film already carries a release group labelled "2026 Re-release," dated 25 September, with dashes where the three gross figures will go. Its domestic release count already reads 2.
The page is pre-wired. Whatever the Encore takes will be added to the $858,373,000 domestic lifetime that currently sits third on the all-time domestic chart, and it will be added silently.
The gap everyone is quoting is not a like-for-like gap
The figure in circulation is that Endgame needs about $124.3 million to retake Avatar as the highest-grossing film ever. The arithmetic is exact: $2,923,710,708 minus $2,799,439,100 is $124,271,608.
What that comparison does not say is what Avatar's number is made of. Its page carries six release groups — the original run, a 2010 Special Edition, and re-releases in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2025. Those five additions come to $180,133,121, which reconciles to the dollar both ways: subtract the original run from the lifetime, or sum the five extra rows, and you get the same figure.
So compare original runs against original runs and the ranking inverts:
- Endgame, original release (24–29 April 2019, 57 markets): domestic $858,373,000, international $1,941,066,100, worldwide $2,799,439,100.
- Avatar, original release: worldwide $2,743,577,587.
- Endgame is ahead by $55,861,513 and has been since 2019.
The record Avatar holds is a record for going back to cinemas six times.
There is a working model from three weeks ago
Cars went back out on 4 September 2026 and finished its 19-market run on 17 September. Its page now reads:
- Original release (logged as 8 June 2006 to 10 August 2017): domestic $244,082,982.
- 2026 re-release: domestic $11,024,120, worldwide $17,428,711, opening $6,304,287 from 2,900 theatres.
- Domestic lifetime: $255,107,102, from "2" releases. Rank 166.
A 2006 film's lifetime total quietly grew by eleven million dollars this month, and its all-time ranking moved with it. That is exactly what is about to happen to Endgame, on a chart where it is one place off the top.
Nobody credible has projected the opening
Two numbers are circulating and neither comes from a distributor or a tracking firm.
- $19–28 million domestic, published 15 September, and credited by the outlet running it to a box-office enthusiast forum rather than to an analyst.
- $40–50 million, published 20 September off a reported $10 million-plus in pre-sales, attributed only to "box office tracking data published by major industry analysts" — no firm, no name.
Disney has published nothing. If you quote the lower range, date-stamp it, because the market moved past it within five days.
What is genuinely unresolved
- Whether the Encore's international takings get folded in too. The 2026 row currently lists its markets as domestic only.
- Whether Avatar picks up more dollars in the same window — its 2025 re-release row is still open and currently shows $4,682 worldwide.
- Whether an altered cut counts as the same title for tracking purposes. Nobody publishes that rule.
A chart that quietly rewards coming back
None of this is fraud. The trackers are consistent, they label the release groups, and anyone who opens the page can see the breakdown. The problem is that the number that leaves the page — the lifetime gross, the all-time rank, the headline — carries none of that with it.
By Monday, Endgame's domestic lifetime will be a larger number than it is today, set in 2026 dollars on top of 2019 dollars, and the sentence reporting it will say the film earned it.
It will also still be behind a film whose lead was built the same way.