Avengers: Infinity War is going to be a lot. A lot of heroes, a lot of villains, a lot of battles, a lot of groups of buddies meeting other groups of buddies, a lot of characters having big arguments and then uniting together to fight their enemies. It’s a lot to get through in one movie, which is why, big surprise, Infinity War is most likely going to clock in at way over two hours, and might be closer to three.

At Comic Con, Collider caught up with co-director Joe Russo to talk runtimes, and Russo revealed that they’re still working on it, but the current cut is almost three hours long.

The current cut is over two and a half [hours]… Most of it’s a movie you could show, but there’s still a lot of work left to be done, I still have a couple of scenes that we haven’t finished from Avengers 3 that I’m shooting in the next few months with my brother, and it’s certainly gonna be a film that lives in the two and a half hour, two and a half hour-plus range.

This will essentially be 2012’s The Avengers, multiplied by a power of 10.

We have to, I mean it’s a culmination event. We’ve gotta take 10 years of storytelling in this Marvel narrative experiment that’s been going on since Iron Man, and we have to take all these disparate tones, disparate themes, motivations, and we have to pull them together in a unified narrative and write the final chapters of the book. There’s no way you could do that with all these characters in under that running length.

To date, the longest MCU movie is Captain America: Civil War at 2 hours and 27 minutes, followed by The Avengers (2 hours and 23 minutes) and Age of Ultron (2 hours and 21 minutes). If Infinity War is nearer to 2 and a half hours or over, it’ll be the longest MCU movie yet. And what about the still-untitled Avengers 4? Russo said it’s hard to say for sure, but it’ll probably have a similarly lengthy runtime.

It’s hard to say because we haven’t shot it yet, but I think again because these are complex movies with a lot of characters, it’s hard to imagine—now look at me I’ll look like an idiot in a couple of months when it’s two hours and twenty minutes, but it’s hard to imagine these movies being short films.

Avengers: Infinity War opens in theaters May 4, 2018.

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