Avengers: Doomsday - How Many Minutes of Screen Time Can Each Avenger Really Get?

If you’re like me, you’ve spent the past few nights unable to get to sleep, wondering – nay, worrying – about how directors Joe and Anthony Russo are going to fit all 27 announced cast members into Avengers: Doomsday. I mean, that’s a lot of superheroes (and villains and anti-heroes), right?

Well, rest easy, True Believers. After applying some Basic Math Technique (an actual class I took in college – and got an “incomplete” in) to this earth-shattering problem, I’m feeling much better about things. Hopefully you will too, as it turns out that when compared to some previous Avengers epics, 27 cast members is basically MCU chump change.

Of course, keeping in mind that the following calculations are estimates (and that Downey, Jr. and Marvel are already teasing that more cast members have yet to be announced), as of right now Doomsday seems to have a leg up as far as giving its various characters time to do some actual avenging.

How Long Will Avengers: Doomsday Be?

The film only started production this week, so there’s no way to know the answer to this yet. But based on the last two Avengers movies, Infinity War and Endgame, we’re going to assume that Doomsday will have a running time of 2 hours and 45 minutes (2:45). That’s basically splitting the difference between Infinity War’s 2 hours and 29 minutes (2:29) and Endgame’s 3 hours and 1 minute (3:01).

Next, since both Infinity War and Endgame had about 12 minutes of closing credits (and a post-credits scene in the former’s case), we’ll trim 12 minutes off of Doomsday’s prospective running time as well. That gives us a theoretical length of 2 hours and 33 minutes (2:33) where actual people can appear onscreen.

How Much Screen Time Can 27 Characters Really Get?

More than you might expect as it turns out! If you simply divide the length of 2:33 by 27, that means each character gets on average, if their time is spread out evenly, about 5 minutes and 40 seconds onscreen. (I wonder what their hourly rate is?)

By comparison, Infinity War had approximately 38 “name” characters, and was a bit shorter than our pretend Doomsday run time, resulting in an average of 3 minutes and 33 seconds per character.

Endgame, meanwhile, was a bit longer, and had a whopping 60 “name” characters (on your left!), resulting in just 2 minutes and 49 seconds of screen time per character. On average, of course.

So What Does All This Math Junk Really Mean for Doomsday?

Of course, there’s no way every character is going to get the same amount of dialogue or close-ups or scenes. Robert Downey, Jr.’s Doctor Doom will almost certainly be the most prominent part of the film, or at the very least will take up the bulk of the screen time with other “classic” players like Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson/Captain America and flashy newcomers such as Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic. And then we also must consider that, you know, actors actually interact with one another in scenes, so Downey, Jr. could be onscreen with, say, Mackie and Pascal all at the same time, with the three sharing their precious minutes.

On the other side of the coin, anyone who has seen Endgame’s big final battle knows that sometimes these Marvel characters show up just long enough for a cool moment or one-liner, and then a handful of group shots. We can’t all be RDJ, you know. So if James Marsden’s Cyclops gets short shrift yet again in Doomsday, don’t feel too bad about it. That seems to be his lot in life in any universe.

So to compare things to the previous Avengers films again, let’s look at how much actual time some players had in Endgame. The folks at ScreenRant and elsewhere already did the legwork on this, so be sure to check out all their facts and figures at the links.

Avengers: Endgame Screen Time

On the high end you have:

• Iron Man/Robert Downey, Jr.: 34 minutes and 45 seconds
• Captain America/Chris Evans: 30 minutes and 45 seconds
• Thor/Chris Hemsworth: 21 minutes and 15 seconds

And on the low end there’s:

• Captain Marvel/Brie Larson: 6 minutes
• Falcon/Anthony Mackie: 4 minutes and 30 seconds
• Doctor Strange/Benedict Cumberbatch: 1 minutes and 15 seconds

The bottom line seems clear: Avengers: Doomsday will probably follow a pattern similar to Endgame. Maybe the players are a little different, but you can sub in a Pedro Pascal for a Chris Evans or, on the other side of things, a Hannah John-Kamen (Ghost) for a Gwyneth Paltrow. And with the Russo Bros. back in the MCU to direct Doomsday and Secret Wars, after so deftly balancing massive casts in both Infinity War and Endgame (and even Civil War before that), the good news is we’ve got a filmmaking team here that have clearly proven their mettle on this front.

Yeah, everything’s gonna work out just fine it turns out!