Meet the Marvel Fans That Helped ‘Endgame’ #BeatAvatar

Last Saturday, in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige declared that Avengers: Endgame was about to break Avatar’s global box office record to become the all-time top-earning movie. Deadline concurred, and on Monday morning, three months to the day that Endgame premiered, Avatar director James Cameron conceded.

Endgame got off to an unsurpassed start as a moneymaker, clearing $2 billion in only 11 days and toppling Titanic (and eliciting an earlier Cameron concession) to take over the second spot in early May. Avatar, the previous fastest film to $2 billion, had taken a relatively leisurely 47 days to reach that figure after its debut in December 2009, and Endgame’s steeper ascent seemed to put it on pace to set the record with room to spare. But as the weeks went by, the movie’s assault on the summit, slowed by modest support in some foreign markets, started looking likely to stall just short of the $2.7897 billion goal.

On June 28, with Endgame still trailing Avatar’s total by $37 million, Disney/Marvel re-released Endgame with some bare-bones bonus content in what looked like a transparent attempt to close the gap. (In fairness to Endgame, Avatar’s total also includes re-release earnings, although the Avatar re-up offered more substantial extras.) That last-ditch effort, coupled with encouragement from cast members, made the difference, helping Endgame accrue the final few million.

Much as Marvel’s marketing, the media’s coverage, and RDJ’s endorsement fueled the film’s run, some small portion of the credit could be due to a group with less of a financial stake in the movie’s ultimate total: diehard fans, many of whom were as motivated as Marvel to give Endgame a box office boost. Those legions of MCU stans on Twitter and Reddit, exhorting each other to see Endgame again and again, may or may not have been numerous enough to significantly further the record chase. But to those outside the tent—or in this case, tentpole—their conspicuous culture consumption represents a modern mystery: Why did so many Marvel fans feel like the 22nd installment in the top-grossing film franchise ever needed their help?

Several hours after Feige’s announcement, @zachmaster014 tweeted, “I still can’t believe we actually did it.” Zach had more reason than most Endgame viewers to use the first-person plural; he’d seen the 182-minute movie 21 times.

The Avengers was Zach’s gateway to the Marvel-verse, and Guardians of the Galaxy got him hooked, captivated by the crossovers and interconnectedness. Most of his screenings of Endgame were “partly driven by wanting it to break the record,” he says, but he never tired of going again. Naturally, he celebrated the news about bodying Avatar by attending for the 22nd time. And yes, he has the receipts.

Other Endgame super-viewers approached or exceeded Zach’s total. In a much-upvoted post on the Marvel Studios subreddit in May, user angelo_kaju—in real life, 21-year-old Justin Martin—posted a picture of the theater from his 15th screening, writing, “Some get tired of watching Avengers: Endgame, but not us. Gotta beat Avatar, whatever it takes.”

Martin eventually raised his total to 20. “I was already rewatching it a bunch of times without knowing [about] the campaign … but once I found out that people were actually trying to get it done, I said why not,” he explains. As unimaginable as Zach and Martin’s totals would be to most moviegoers, they’re nowhere near the endurance record: Florida man Agustin Alanis saw Endgame 200 times—more than 25 days’ worth of watching—in its first 89 days in theaters.

Martin’s entreaty to beat Avatar, and the text in Zach’s Twitter name and profile, “#WeBeatAvatar,” are references to the popular hashtag that often accompanied tweets about Endgame’s growing earnings, #BeatAvatar. The online rallying cry was popularized by YouTuber Jack Douglass, whose jacksfilms channel boasts 4.6 million subscribers. On May 1, Douglass posted a video titled, “Watch Endgame. Beat Avatar.” In the roughly three-minute piece, Douglass, wearing a Captain America T-shirt, says, “I want Endgame to beat Avatar so, so badly” and then makes the case that Avatar was too forgettable to deserve its exalted position. At the end of the video, which has been viewed almost a million times, the #WatchEndgame and #BeatAvatar hashtags appear on the screen, blinking calls to action.

Douglass declined to comment on the role his video (and his several well-traveled #BeatAvatar tweets) played in focusing fans’ feelings, but his sentiment seemed to tap into a preexisting desire for Endgame to topple all competitors. Even though the MCU was hardly a subcultural niche ignored by the mainstream or some struggling series in danger of not being renewed, some fans still felt that the genre had something to prove, and that even more money might send a message.

“I’m not exactly sure where the #BeatAvatar hashtag originated, but I think a lot of Marvel fans took it personally as a way to fight back against the dumb ‘Superhero Fatigue’ myth that a lot of the media has been pushing for several years now,” says Jeremy Conrad, founder and editor-in-chief of MCUCosmic.com. “There are writers who absolutely despise the superhero genre and have been pushing a myth that audiences will eventually tire of the movies, and the genre will go away (so they don’t have to cover it anymore). Endgame taking the #1 spot would be a huge sign that the narrative simply is not true, and never was.” Conrad notes that reports after the re-release that continued to cast doubt on Endgame’s record-breaking ability spurred on supporters to prove the pundits wrong.

Frustrated by the difficulty of obtaining frequent earnings updates and forecasts, a 28-year-old San Jose computer engineer named Sam capitalized on the fan furor by building an algorithm to generate automatically updating predictions of Endgame’s trajectory based on the latest data and the performance of previous Marvel movies. He started streaming on his just-launched YouTube channel on May 19 and kept it up 24/7 until the record was broken. He didn’t do any marketing, but word of mouth on WhatsApp and Facebook drove traffic to his streams. By the fateful day when Endgame crawled past Avatar, he says, “my Endgame vs. Avatar streams had collectively accumulated 15 million views from 5 million unique viewers and my subscribers count had jumped from 25 to 32,000.”

One obvious question is what the record Sam’s stream revolved around really means, considering we’re comparing films produced under different conditions a decade apart. The head-to-head battle places Endgame and Avatar on the same scale, with no attempt to account for currency strength or inflation.

Bruce Nash, the founder and publisher of venerable movie industry data provider The Numbers, says, “We have average ticket prices for most countries going back at least to 2000. There’s enough that you could do a sort of reasonable adjustment for Avatar. But you’re adjusting for ticket price and for exchange rate, in that case. And really what you want to do is have an estimate of tickets sold, which just isn’t reported.”

If it were reported, Nash says, some older movies—including Gone With the Wind, The Sound of Music, Doctor Zhivago, and Lawrence of Arabia—would likely have higher totals. Of course, the people who bought tickets to see those films had fewer entertainment options vying for their disposable dollars (or other local currency). “You kind of want to do market share or something, but then do you adjust for population? It’s endless,” Nash says.

Even if we limit the discussion to the two films in question, partisans on either side could question the other’s legitimacy. Avatar played a lot longer in theaters (although Endgame opened in 1,210 more), but unlike Endgame, it didn’t have the power of a preexisting franchise behind it. Endgame benefited from a bigger movie market in China (where it tripled Avatar’s take), but unlike Avatar, it didn’t build buzz from flashy new technology. “The big draw of that film was that it was this huge spectacular,” Nash says. “People were watching in IMAX and 3-D and paying a premium price for that, and that’s very difficult to adjust for when all you have is a total dollar amount.”

The industry’s vicissitude poses impossible problems for retroactive box office accountants, but the present is pretty pesky too. “You think of an election in the U.S. where you’ve got millions of people voting and you’re counting all of those votes and you’re tabulating them in all these ways to determine who the winner is,” Nash says. “Essentially we do that every single day of the year in the movie industry. And by noon the next day, we have a total for every film that was playing in the country. That’s kind of incredible. And what we’re talking about here is kind of the Florida recount scenario, where you’re looking at every single vote.”

Given the scope of that exercise, box office totals are estimates, so they aren’t well-equipped to settle small differences between films. Nash recounts a conversation he had during Avatar’s record run with the studio executive responsible for compiling and publishing the movie’s earnings, who acknowledged that the numbers were inherently inexact. “He said, ‘We think we’re really good, but it’s probably plus or minus 1 percent on a film,’” Nash says. “When you’re looking at $2.5 billion, $25 million of that is guesswork. And really, probably another $50 million is down to interpretation of exchange rates and converting theaters that only report ticket sales into an estimate of the actual box office for that theater, and so on and so forth. So my gut feel would be, honestly, you’re probably plus or minus $75 million.”

The current distance between the two totals is less than $2 million, which is well within that massive margin of error. “That’s not to say that there’s anything nefarious going on here at all,” Nash says. “Just that realistically, at some point you have to stop and say, ‘This is the number.’”

So Endgame may or may not have actually made more money than Avatar, even if we pretend that the two competed on even footing. Oh, and Avatar stands a good chance of reclaiming the record if, as expected, it’s re-released again in advance of 2021’s Avatar 2. All of that argues against making too much of this, but “it’s an important part of the industry, just from a marketing perspective,” Nash says. “The studios benefit from being able to say that they’re breaking records.”

That doesn’t mean we consumers have to swallow that line, but it’s fun to feel like a winner, if only by being associated with one; Martin mentions that it’s “cool as a fan to be able to be a part of something big, such as helping a movie that is one for the ages.” If Avatar ever reclaims the top spot, he says, he’ll still take consolation in knowing that Endgame “was no. 1 at one point in time.”

Reddit user “nevergofullboyle,” who in May adapted Captain America’s stirring speech from the movie into an inspirational plea to purchase more tickets, says, “I don’t think it matters if it’s inflation adjusted, because it was hardly about the real value of money it made, it was about the record and the number in the record.” Although that sounds semi-absurd—shouldn’t the real value of the money mean something in a money-making record chase?—it reflects how most fans feel. The record is what the culture collectively decides it is, and most of us don’t want to do math.

The same Reddit user says he was inspired to see Endgame five times by Feige’s framing that Endgame was the culmination of everything that preceded it in the series. For nevergofullboyle, the MCU has become a bonding experience: His uncle took him to his first Marvel movie (The Avengers) in 2012, and subsequent releases have united him with his cousins, who live in different cities. “We come together at least once to watch one Marvel movie every year, and it’s really magical,” he says, adding, “I really wanted Endgame to beat Avatar [because] this movie was a love letter to the fans.”

Journalist Elizabeth Minkel, who covers fan culture, says that the us vs. them mantra of #BeatAvatar jibes with a change in the way franchises present themselves. In attending MCU announcements at Comic-Con over the past five years, she’s perceived a shift to a model that feels more akin to sports than to other forms of fandom. “Often when they are announcing and bringing out these casts, I feel like they’re announcing the lineup for the all-star team,” Minkel says, adding, “The way they talked about Endgame was sort of like, ‘You have to see it that weekend if you want to be part of the event.’ It feels more like, ‘You’ve gotta watch the Super Bowl’ or ‘You’ve gotta watch the big game.’ And the idea of, ‘You are a Marvel fan, you’re on this team, and you are of course gonna show up for every big game.’”

Just as sports fans sometimes brawl with rival rooters, movie franchise fans’ energy can get twisted and toxic when fans who feel ownership over a franchise decide that it no longer looks like they think it should. Rooting for two multi-billion-dollar pieces of IP to trade places on a somewhat silly leaderboard is largely benign behavior, even if it does turn people into corporate promoters (albeit willing ones). Whether one supports Endgame or Avatar, Disney’s coffers are filled—much like they are when NFL fans flock to ESPN, another Disney asset. “You are cheering for a corporation to make money, basically,” Minkel says.

As she notes, though, “a lot of fans have a really vested interest in making it really clear to the people creating their stuff that they love it.” And in the case of today’s massive multimedia properties, “there are so many people making it that the only way you can really show your allegiance, the only way that feels truly tangible, is by buying things from them.”

In an era when new content and corporate structures are so foregrounded, Minkel argues, fans are more aware than ever of the economic calculus underpinning the things that they love. But they’re also ill-equipped to turn that knowledge into power. “That can be kind of hard to process,” Minkel says. “How can you influence it in any way? You see this in music fandom, too—you really want to help, you want to do the work for the team that you’re on or for the thing that you like. And so you wind up streaming the song a million times or trying to buy as many tickets as you can … because you really feel like you want to have a stake in it. And actually, your 20 tickets to Endgame were not what put the box office numbers over the edge there, but it really feels like you can contribute.”

Martin says as much: “If anything, we want Marvel to make more money because that means they’ll be more inclined to do more in the future.” (Not that the Marvel machine would have ground to a halt if Endgame had peaked at a measly $2.78 billion.) But he adds that “to me it isn’t about that. It’s about the title itself and the movie and those who were there growing up with the whole universe. The MCU has had a positive impact on many people’s lives.” Some fans feel like paying it back.

On July 22, Douglass published a video victory lap to mark the conclusion of the successful campaign. The two-minute monologue, called “UPDATE: We won, Mr. Stark,” has also attracted almost a million views.

“If you bought a ticket to see Endgame in theaters, congratulations, hero,” Douglass says before signing off. Not all heroes wear capes. Some go see blockbusters 200 times.