We've got a bit more detail on how long Avengers: Endgame will be, and if you'd been hoping for a lean 80-minute thriller you're going to be disappointed. It's a whopper.

"There's a high probability that this movie will clock in at around three hours," co-director Joe Russo told Empire. "It's a big movie with a lot of story."

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When Russo said in early November that Avengers 4 was knocking on three hours in the edit, there was always the assumption that it would be chiselled down to the something approaching the other Avengers films' runtimes - The Avengers is 143 minutes, Age of Ultron is 144 minutes, and Infinity War is 149 minutes - but as he should probably know what's happening with his own film, the prospect of a beefy 180-minuter is very real indeed.

Russo's actual words on the subject were originally "we'll see if that holds", and there's a lot of editing and VFX work still to go before a mooted March wrap-up so that runtime could still come down.

There's a lot of pressure on a film that's more than three hours long, too: either you're aiming to put yourself alongside the likes of The Godfather II and Lawrence of Arabia - which are both quite good, and will probably make your decentish film look a bit rubbish by comparison - or you're going to end up with an unforgivably flabby lump like Heaven's Gate or Pearl Harbor.

Still, three hours in the company of Tony Stark and pals has to be a lot more fun than watching Kris Kristofferson chasing cows for five and a half hours.

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