‘Avengers: Doomsday’ Has Already Made $50 Million in Pre-Sales — And People Are Buying Disney’s Infinity Vision Gambit

Disney announced on Wednesday that “Avengers: Doomsday” has already made $50 million in domestic pre-sales, a staggering number for a movie that still doesn’t open for over three months. It already surpassed “The Odyssey,” which did $40 million in pre-sales, and it’s approaching “Avengers: Endgame,” which made $60 million, but has a ways to go yet to catch the current record holder of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” which made $72 million.

But knowing that there are fanboys excited for an Avengers movie perhaps isn’t surprising. What’s more surprising is that those nerds are also lining up to see the movie in what’s known as “Infinity Vision,” a moniker that Disney effectively has made up in response to “Dune: Part Three,” opening the same day as “Avengers: Doomsday,” claiming all the IMAX theaters.

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Disney’s CFO Hugh Johnston said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference that “Doomsday” has already surpassed $50 million in pre-sales domestic since going on sale on July 20, but that 70 percent of those sales (or $35 million if you’re doing the math) were for Infinity Vision tickets.

It’s impossible to know if ticket buyers are specifically going out of their way to buy a ticket for Infinity Vision over a regular theater without the branding (or if knowing a theater is in Infinity Vision is effective marketing for convincing someone to buy a ticket in advance), but Disney certainly likes seeing the numbers either way.

What’s funny is that Infinity Vision is not a format like IMAX or even necessarily a specific premium large format (PLF) option that necessarily charges extra. It is Disney’s own certification, a stamp of approval from the company that basically says, “This theater meets our criteria for the picture and sound quality expected of this movie.” And because this is a brand new label that hasn’t been applied to any movie just yet, it’s not as if anyone knows what Infinity Vision entails the way they would when seeing a movie in IMAX.

In fact, Disney’s own criteria isn’t exactly groundbreaking. At a minimum, a screen has to be 45 feet wide, which is just about the average length for a screen at your local multiplex. An IMAX screen by comparison is at least 60 feet wide. Disney also lists that theaters need either immersive sound (like Dolby Atmos) or 7.1 sound and “brightness levels reaching either 14 footlamberts in 2D and/or 6 footlamberts in 3D.” We always say movies don’t have enough footlamberts these days. When IndieWire inevitably makes Jim Hemphill sit through “Doomsday” in an Infinity Vision screening to report on the difference, he will most likely just be going to any old movie theater.

For now, only “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Avengers: Endgame: The Encore” are being released in Infinity Vision — and “released” is still a relative term since again, this is not a new format. Disney is not going out of its way to release “Doomsday” in VistaVision the way Christopher Nolan or Paul Thomas Anderson might demand. Disney will probably release other movies at some point with the Infinity Vision branding and keep this thing going for longer than just two movies, but it’s hard to fathom that a rival studio would adopt Infinity Vision for its own films or that theaters will embrace the branding for other movies in the long term. That said, Disney announced in June that it had received more than 7,500 applications from exhibitor screens globally to be considered for certification, so they’re at least taking this seriously for now.

It’s notable because IMAX loves to brag that people go to certain movies because it’s in IMAX, that slapping the big IMAX logo on a poster actually helps that movie’s cause, and that the box office it brings in wouldn’t be there for these movies otherwise. Nolan and “The Odyssey” are giving IMAX more ammunition for those claims, as we wrote just yesterday that for the IMAX 70mm screenings specifically, of which there are about 40 theaters in the world, it has made $73 million on just those screens.

Regardless, excitement for “Avengers: Doomsday” is clearly high however people are choosing to see it. Disney says the trailer for the Marvel sequel is its most-viewed trailer of all time, and Marvel fans in anticipation of the movie have spent an extra 420 million hours re-watching old Marvel titles on Disney+ over the last month, which in the streaming age is exactly why studios keep going back to the well with these sequels.

So to paraphrase Thanos, where did all this rambling and analysis about Infinity Vision bring us? Back to me.

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