However Marvel’s heroes defeat Thanos in next year’s follow-up to Avengers: Infinity War, it’s not going to happen quickly. In a recent live-streamed Q&A, director Joe Russo said that Avengers 4 is the longest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie yet — at least as it currently stands.


“The running time on Avengers 4 is currently sitting right at three hours. We’ll see if that holds,” he said during an Instagram chat to promote his new bar, Duello, in downtown Los Angeles. That runtime is likely to change, however. In response to a question about where the movie is in terms of postproduction, he revealed, “We’re about halfway through the editing process. We’re really just scratching the surface on our VFX shots. There are more than 3,000 VFX shots in the movie; those require a lot of time and thought and energy and effort, and we’re very early in the phase of getting VFX done. We’ve just started work with Alan Silvestri on the score, and we’re still editing picture at this point.”


Russo, who’s co-directing the feature with brother Anthony, stayed tight-lipped on the title of the movie, trolling fans with two separate fake technical errors that prevented him from revealing it. But he was happy to promise that it would live up to fans’ expectations. “Will the stakes be higher in Avengers 4? Absolutely. 100 percent,” Russo said. “The highest of any of the films to date, without question.”


Currently, Avengers: Infinity War holds the Marvel MCU runtime record with a length of two hours, forty minutes. Avengers 4 wrapped in October, while news that 13 Reasons Why star Katherine Langford had joined the project also broke last month.
Avengers 4 will be released May 3, 2019.