Disney Buries 'Avengers: Endgame' With New Franchise Movie, Replacements Confirmed

With the next big chapter in the Avengers series coming next year with Avengers: Doomsday (2026), the legacy of the long Marvel movies is being buried by another tentpole franchise.

Disney has a new longest film on its hands. Avatar: Fire and Ash is arriving on December 19, 2025, at a hefty 3 hours and 15 minutes (per AMC listings)—making it the longest theatrical release in the studio’s history. The previous record holder was 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water at 3 hours and 12 minutes, so James Cameron has extended his dominance by just three more minutes.

To understand why Disney audiences now accept such extended runtimes, it’s worth looking back at Avengers: Endgame. When that film was released in 2019, its 3-hour and 2-minute length was genuinely shocking for a Marvel blockbuster. It was asking mainstream audiences to sit through an epic designed to conclude a decade-long saga spanning tens of films.

But it worked. Audiences continued to show up, and Endgame became a massive success. More importantly, it proved that viewers would accept extended runtimes if the story justified it. That single film fundamentally shifted what the studio thought was possible theatrically, as it became the longest Disney-distributed movie, surpassing 170 minutes. Since then, however, both the Avatar sequel and the threequel have surpassed Endgame as the Mouse House’s longest endeavors.

The 195 minutes of Fire and Ash see the characters venture into new volcanic biomes and introduce the Ash People—a fundamentally different Na’vi civilization. Unlike the peaceful clans from previous films, these are aggressive and ideologically complex. Oona Chaplin plays Varang, their leader, who represents a faction that actively rejects Eywa, the spiritual force central to Na’vi culture.

This adds genuine narrative complexity. Rather than a simple human-versus-Na’vi conflict, the story now includes internal ideological warfare within Pandora itself. Cameron explained to Entertainment Weekly that the title’s symbolism—fire representing “hatred, anger, violence” and ash representing “the aftermath”—runs throughout the film’s emotional core.

Three-hour films are becoming standard for major franchises. What once seemed excessive now feels expected for event cinema. Cameron has delivered all post-production work and promises the completed film is “more intense, more emotional, and bigger in scale,” per The Direct, than anything Pandora has shown before.

Looking ahead to Avengers: Doomsday, a major movie that will bookend next year for Disney, too, there is a chance it could come close to the runtime of Avengers: Endgame or the Avatar movies, but chances are it won’t.

While Endgame had to wrap up a decade’s worth of storytelling, both Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige and the directing duo Anthony and Joe Russo, AKA the Russo Brothers, have claimed Doomsday to be a new beginning, likely setting its successor, Avengers: Secret Wars (2027), to be the lengthier of the two.

Avengers: Doomsday is scheduled for release on December 18, 2026, while Avengers: Secret Wars is set for December 17, 2027.

How do you feel about the length of James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar movie? Let Inside the Magic know in the comments down below!