By the Numbers: Where Endgame Encore Actually Ranks Among Hollywood's Biggest Re-Releases

12 days ago by Jordan Blake 6 min read

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Avengers: Endgame Encore opened to $26 million, the third-best domestic re-release weekend ever, $800,000 ahead of last year's Revenge of the Sith. Here's the full ranked list, the ratio that makes Encore look weakest of all, and why a seven-year-old movie with four minutes of Doomsday footage is really a trailer you pay to see.

Avengers: Endgame Encore opened to $26.0 million domestic on September 25-27. You've probably already read that this is the third-best re-release opening ever. That's true, but the headline number is the least interesting thing in the dataset. Let me show you what the rest of the list reveals.

The ranked list

Here are the biggest domestic opening weekends for theatrical re-releases I could verify against at least two sources (trade reports, Box Office Mojo, Disney's own newsroom). All figures are three-day domestic weekends, not adjusted for inflation:

• 1. Star Wars: Special Edition (1997) — $35.9 million
• 2. The Lion King 3D (2011) — $30.2 million
• 3. Avengers: Endgame Encore (2026) — $26.0 million
• 4. Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, 20th anniversary (2025) — $25.2 million
• 5. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace 3D (2012) — $22.5 million
• 6. The Empire Strikes Back: Special Edition (1997) — $22.0 million
• 7. Beauty and the Beast 3D (2012) — $17.8 million
• 8. Titanic 3D (2012) — $17.3 million

Star Wars shows up in four of the eight slots. And the gap between No. 3 and No. 4 is $800,000, less than a single decent Thursday preview night.

Clearing up the Revenge of the Sith number

If you've seen a figure in the mid-$30 millions quoted for last year's Revenge of the Sith anniversary run, which would push Encore down to fourth, it doesn't match the record. Disney's own box office release put the April 2025 opening at $25.2 million domestic and $42.2 million worldwide, and the trades reported the same. So the "third-best" framing survives, but only barely. Revenge of the Sith held that bronze medal for 17 months, and Encore took it by about 3%.

One more qualifier: third-best is the domestic ranking. On the worldwide chart, Encore's $86 million ($60 million of it international) is second among re-releases, behind Titanic 3D in 2012.

The ratio nobody is talking about

Raw dollars flatter Encore. A better question: how much of a film's original opening came back for the re-release? Here's each re-release weekend as a percentage of the original release's opening weekend:

• The Lion King 3D — 74% ($30.2M vs $40.9M wide opening in 1994) ███████████████
• The Phantom Menace 3D — 35% ($22.5M vs $64.8M in 1999) ███████
• Revenge of the Sith 2025 — 23% ($25.2M vs $108.4M in 2005) █████
• Endgame Encore — 7.3% ($26.0M vs $357.1M in 2019) █

By this measure, Encore is the weakest re-release on the list. But that isn't really a knock on Encore. It shows how absurd the 2019 opening was. Endgame's $357.1 million debut held the domestic record for seven years until Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened to $360 million this summer. You can't recapture 30% of a record-breaking weekend with a movie everyone has on Disney+.

And Star Wars breaks the scale in the other direction. The 1977 original opened in only a few dozen theaters for $1.55 million. The 1997 Special Edition made about 23 times that in its first weekend. That's not a re-release, that's the wide opening the film never got.

Compare across decades

The list sorts cleanly into three eras:

• 1997: the Special Edition era. Two of the top six. New effects shots, a 20-year gap, and a generation seeing Star Wars on a big screen for the first time.
• 2011-2012: the 3D conversion era. Four of the top eight in about seven months. The gimmick was the format, and nothing from that wave has come close since.
• 2025-2026: the anniversary-event era. Two of the top four in 17 months, with no format gimmick at all. What they sell is the event itself: premium large formats, fan screenings, and (in Encore's case) new footage.

Now look at the age of each film when it came back:

• Star Wars SE: 20 years
• The Lion King 3D: 17 years
• Revenge of the Sith: 20 years
• The Phantom Menace 3D: 13 years
• Endgame Encore: 7 years

Every other film in the top five waited at least 13 years. Encore did it in seven, while the original is still streaming in every Disney+ household. That's the stat that actually says something about brand durability.

Why Disney did this now

Here's the business logic. Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, and it's the only MCU film Disney is releasing in theaters this year. Marvel did have a 2026 theatrical hit, but it was Sony's: Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened July 31 and is at roughly $2.5 billion worldwide. So Disney's own Marvel theatrical calendar was empty from January to mid-December, and Encore fills it.

The four minutes of new footage are the part that turns this from a nostalgia cash-in into marketing. According to Variety's and TheWrap's rundowns, the four scenes are:

• Loki, in his TVA uniform, knocking on Steve and Peggy's door during the final dance
• Bruce Banner experimenting with gamma radiation in isolation, until an off-screen Doctor Doom approaches
• The TVA watching two Earths collide as some 3,000 universes hit incursions at once
• A post-credits scene set to the sound of Tony Stark forging the Mark I mask, ending on Doom in his own mask

None of that is fan service for 2019. All four scenes set up December. Disney got fans to pay $26 million to watch what is essentially a four-minute Doomsday trailer attached to a three-hour movie they already own. Most studios pay to put trailers in front of audiences. This one charged admission.

Trend or gap-year fix?

Let me put both hypotheses against the data.

The case for a trend: two of the four biggest re-release openings ever happened in the last 17 months. Both came from Disney, and neither relied on a format upgrade. Before 2025, the best re-release opening since the pandemic was Avatar's roughly $10 million in 2022. Anniversary re-releases are clearly worth more than they used to be.

The case for a Marvel fix: Encore is the only film on the list with new footage built to sell a sequel, and the only one that came back before it turned 10. Take away December's Avengers movie and the strategic reason for Encore largely disappears. Nobody is re-releasing Age of Ultron.

The data-backed conclusion

Both things are true, but at different scales. The trend is real: Sith and Encore show that a well-marketed event re-release can now open at $25 million or more without a format gimmick, which hadn't happened since The Lion King 3D in 2011. But Encore's specific formula (seven years old, four minutes of setup footage, five months before a sequel) is a Marvel-specific tool, and it only works when an Avengers movie is coming.

The number I'd watch isn't Encore's opening weekend, it's the 7.3% ratio. If Doomsday's opening on December 18 lands anywhere near Endgame's $357 million, then Avengers: Doomsday will have been the real point of this weekend all along, and Encore's $26 million will have been cheap marketing that paid for itself.