After Avengers: Endgame was officially announced as a three hour and two minute epic, one particular question came up that hasn’t really been raised with any other Marvel Studios film: Will there be time to pee? Sure, three hours sounds intimidating, but with so many other films before it running close to that length in the MCU, is it really that big of a question? Well if it’s an issue close to your heart, producer/mastermind Kevin Feige has given an answer as to when is the best time to pee during Avengers: Endgame. Unfortunately for those with small bladders, that answer is never.
What I’ve always said is a movie is as long as it should be. And we are not fans of overindulging movies. We are not fans of laborious lengths for no reason. We are fans of movies that you wish didn’t end. Movies that you want to see again as soon as it’s over. And movies that you just don’t ever find a good time to run out to the bathroom. That’s when a movie’s working. And if a movie doesn’t feel like that to us we continue to trim, we continue to shape, we continue to bring that time down. That happened to a certain extent on this movie. But we got to a point where it feels very exciting and goes by very quickly and in the end is the perfect length. And everybody that saw the movie felt the same way.
This particular subject was raised at this weekend’s press junket for the Infinity Saga’s swan song, and Feige explained that they tweaked the movie until they got to the point where there was no downtime in the film.
So, rather than being a sadistic response to a rather public issue, Kevin Feige is saying that Avengers: Endgame is such a well-woven story that every second of screen time is earned in the eyes of the creators. If that claim holds up, and everything we’ve seen come out of the film’s marketing indicates such a scenario may be likely, you’re definitely going to want to go to the bathroom before taking the trip to defeat Thanos and not whilst in the middle of it.
You could pretty much expect this piece of information Kevin Feige told io9 to spark up the debate of whether or not an intermission is required during Avengers: Endgame, and for sure this information changes the terms of that discussion. If the plot to this particular film is so hypothetically dense there’s little-to-no period of time the audience can be absent, then even those who feel that a film of this stature doesn’t require a breather might be persuaded to change their tune. This only makes the claim that the second half of the film is apparently mind-blowing all the more intriguing.
Of course, this is coming from Kevin Feige, and to say he’s biased towards Avengers: Endgame, or any of the MCU films, is an understatement. What may be an invaluable moment of Ant-Man joking about defeating Thanos through the worst re-enactment of Fantastic Voyage ever for some, might be another audience member’s perfect time to purge the soft drinks he or she consumed earlier.
Avengers: Endgame will be in theaters on April 26th, but if you’re seriously concerned about bladder-pacing issues, you might want to wait a little while for some public feedback to see whether or not this film will give you a problem. Which gives you a little more time to study our feature on what order you should experience the MCU prior to Avengers: Endgame.
