Quick recap for anyone who spent the weekend outside: a seven-year-old movie walked into theaters and beat everything Hollywood freshly made. As Deseret reported, the Avengers: Endgame re-release, officially branded Endgame Encore, pulled in massive earnings over the weekend and outpaced every original release at the box office.

I wrote about this when Encore first topped the chart, and I figured that was the nostalgia spike, the fans who missed the theatrical moment in 2019 getting their do-over, and then a normal slide from there. Nope. The thing keeps winning. A movie most of us have watched on a couch a dozen times is out-drawing films people have never seen.

So what's going on? I keep landing on the same theory, and the numbers back it up: audiences showed up for the communal big-screen experience, not the plot. Nobody buying an Encore ticket is going in cold. They know every beat, they know when to cheer, they know the girl behind them is going to lose it during Portals. You're not watching a movie at that point, you're attending an event. That's what a re-release can offer that no new release can, because a new movie can't promise you the ending will land before you've bought the popcorn.

There's also the Endgame of it all. Whatever you think of the MCU now, and let's be fair, the last few years have been wobbly, that movie was the payoff to years of interconnected storytelling. Hollywood hasn't attempted anything on that scale since, and the audience can feel the absence. Encore works as a re-release of something, and the something was a period when the whole machine actually worked.

Timing helps too. September is traditionally a dead zone, the month where studios dump the leftovers before prestige season kicks in. When your competition is thin, a beloved giant looks even bigger.

Is there a lesson here for the studios? Sure, several, but the obvious one is that theatrical is not dead, unremarkable theatrical is dead. People will absolutely leave home, pay parking, and sit through 25 minutes of trailers for something that matters to them. They just need a reason. Right now a seven-year-old movie is giving them a better reason than anything else on the marquee.

The other lesson is the one studios will actually take, which is "re-release everything," so expect a flood of anniversaries coming to a theater near you. Some of them will earn it. Most won't, because you can't manufacture a decade of buildup in a marketing meeting.

Anyway, if Encore is playing near you and you have even a passing affection for these characters, go. Take someone who cried the first time. Bring tissues for them.