Disney's new premium-screen brand notches an early win as "Avengers" re-release tops the box office

Disney's answer to losing an IMAX release slot got its first real market test over the weekend, and the early numbers suggest the studio's improvised premium-format brand is pulling its weight. The theatrical re-release of "Avengers: Endgame," rebranded "Avengers: Endgame: Encore," took the No. 1 spot at the North American box office with $26.1 million and added roughly $60 million overseas for an $86 million global weekend, according to weekend figures compiled by Box Office Mojo. More striking than the topline number, industry trackers say, is where the money came from: more than half of domestic ticket buyers chose to see the seven-year-old film on a screen certified under Infinity Vision, the premium-theater brand Disney built from scratch this year after "Avengers: Doomsday" was shut out of IMAX.

The re-release was never just nostalgia programming. It was a live rehearsal for December, when "Doomsday" opens against Warner Bros. and Legendary's "Dune: Part Three" on the same date, December 18, with IMAX's largest screens already promised to the Denis Villeneuve film.

A format born of a scheduling collision

The root of the story is a booking fight Disney lost. IMAX had committed its network to "Dune: Part Three" for an exclusive window beginning December 14, leaving "Avengers: Doomsday" without access to the format that has anchored Marvel's biggest openings for more than a decade. Rather than concede the premium-ticket business to a rival studio's release, Disney's theatrical unit spent the spring building its own certification standard for large-format screens it does not own.

The Walt Disney Studios unveiled the program at CinemaCon in April, describing it in an official announcement from the company's newsroom as a joint effort with exhibitors to flag the best available screens to moviegoers. To qualify, an auditorium needs a screen at least 45 feet wide, an immersive audio system such as Dolby Atmos or 7.1 surround, and laser-projection brightness of at least 14 foot-lamberts for 2D content. More than 75 domestic and roughly 300 global premium large-format screens met the bar at launch, folding in existing chains such as Cinemark's XD, Regal's RX and AMC's Prime rather than requiring exhibitors to install new hardware.

"There are approximately 320 premium format brands worldwide," Andrew Cripps, Disney's head of theatrical distribution, said in June at the ICTA Cinema Technology Experience in Barcelona, explaining the logic behind an umbrella label. He was blunter about the trigger: "We have a movie, it's no secret, at the end of the year, 'Avengers: Doomsday,' that does not have IMAX," Cripps said, according to a report from the trade outlet Celluloid Junkie.

Exhibitors sign on, and dangle new footage to prove it

Disney had leverage to get theater chains to participate: exclusive content. The "Endgame: Encore" cut added roughly five minutes of new material, including an introduction from Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans, and a new "Doomsday" post-credits scene was withheld from standard screenings and reserved for IMAX and Infinity Vision-certified auditoriums only. That gave fans a direct incentive to pay premium prices, and gave participating chains a reason to promote their upgraded rooms under Disney's new label.

Cinemark, one of the largest U.S. exhibitors, put its XD screens behind the program and has said it is upgrading additional auditoriums to the format specifically around the Marvel release calendar. Regional chains signed on as well; Classic Cinemas, an Illinois-based circuit, said presales for "Doomsday" on its premium XD screens were running well ahead of expectations. Disney has since disclosed that more than 70% of the roughly $50 million in "Doomsday" advance ticket sales booked so far have gone to Infinity Vision-certified auditoriums, and that early ScreenX presales are running 325% ahead of where "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" stood at the same point in its cycle.

The weekend results gave the theory its first hard data point. Infinity Vision-certified screens accounted for 52% of "Endgame: Encore" ticket sales, according to industry estimates reported by TheWrap, while IMAX screens that still played the film brought in $13.7 million worldwide, about 16% of the total. "As a marketing exercise, it's an effective way to build early word-of-mouth," box office analyst David A. Gross told the Philippine Star.

IMAX is not convinced

IMAX's own executives have made little effort to hide their skepticism. Chief executive Rich Gelfond told interviewers in July that Infinity Vision represents no technical advance at all. "It's not a new technological advance in any way; it's a marketing initiative," Gelfond said, adding that "it's not going to open an additional projection system. It's not going to add any special look or feel to the film. It is a way to market 'Avengers.'"

"We'll find out if it works or not," Gelfond said of Disney's new premium-screen brand, months before the first data arrived.

That data has now arrived, at least in preliminary form, and it has not settled the argument so much as sharpened it. IMAX still points out, accurately, that Infinity Vision introduced no new projection technology and simply relabeled existing large-format auditoriums under a Disney-owned trademark. Disney's counter is that the label does not need to be a technical breakthrough to work commercially — only to move ticket buyers toward higher-priced seats, which the "Endgame: Encore" weekend suggests it did.

Who has a stake in the outcome

The immediate winners are the exhibitors that joined early. Cinemark, Regal and AMC each stand to collect a larger share of premium-ticket revenue from "Doomsday" than they would have if the film had simply played in standard auditoriums while IMAX business went entirely to "Dune: Part Three." Moviegoers face the more prosaic effect: another branded premium tier, layered atop IMAX, 4DX and ScreenX, to sort through when buying a ticket, generally at a markup over standard pricing. Rival studios are watching closely, too. If Infinity Vision proves durable rather than a one-film workaround, it could give Disney a permanent negotiating tool against IMAX's scheduling leverage — and give other studios reason to build or join similar labels of their own.

What happens next

The real test is still ten weeks away. Marvel Studios' official release page lists "Avengers: Doomsday" opening domestically on December 18, the same day as "Dune: Part Three," with IMAX screens exclusively booked to the Villeneuve film beginning December 14. Disney's presale figures suggest audiences are already sorting themselves into premium formats ahead of that head-to-head weekend, but a single re-release of a seven-year-old film, however successful, is a different proposition than an opening weekend for a new tentpole competing directly against another studio's biggest release of the year. Both companies have reason to keep talking about the numbers between now and then: Disney to validate a format it built in months rather than years, and IMAX to argue that no amount of rebranding replaces the screens it still controls.