Will Avengers: Endgame be a Throwback to the old school Roadshows?
As you may or may not have already heard, Avengers: Endgame is clocked in at 3 hours long. According to the directors the Russo Brothers, this was made final after successful test screenings. But a lot of people don’t know that usually a 3 plus hour movie has to have an intermission or something so people don’t have exploding kidneys (see the Simpsons Episode “Homer Simpson in Kidney Trouble” for a great reference)
Anyways let me go into more detail on why a 3 plus hour running time for a movie has a rich history in cinema. You see back in the day there was a cinema in Los Angeles called “Cinerama” and this movie theater was equipped with a 70 mm film projector the screen was like a half circle, it was a huge deal at the time. This was where BIG movies played (these were called Roadshows) some examples of Roadshow movies were: Ben Hur, The Sand Pebbles, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (One of My Personal Favorites), 2001: A Space Odyssey, and most recently Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.
Your basic Roadshow consisted of a souvenir program (which had tidbits, facts, still photos of the movie, etc.) it was your basic collectible. Also at these Roadshows, basically the movie went down like this: an Overture (a musical set that gets people hyped for the movie) the movie itself (the first hour and a half, an intermission (insert piss break here) then the remaining hour and a half of the movie, then an outro (a very rare thing) usually after the credits but it was something to send people home, today's version of that is your average post credit scene.
So will Marvel go old school and do the Roadshow?! Personally I like the idea, if you have a running time of 3 plus hours and slap an intermission in, Have an overture. Give the patrons a souvenir program. The only downfall is the format, you see 70 mm is kind of obsolete, there are less than 100 projectors out there in the US, I remember seeing “The Hateful Eight” in 70 mm, I had to drive to Providence to see it. It was a feeling I can’t describe you have to experience it. Maybe Disney will do something with Endgame, maybe not. Who know. Avengers Endgame drops worldwide on April 26th.
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