I said last week that I'd bet on Avengers: Endgame Encore beating Resident Evil to the top of the weekend box office, and I said it for a reason that had nothing to do with either movie being better than the other. The bet paid off. Estimates out Sunday afternoon have Encore at $26.0 million domestic and $86 million worldwide for its Sept. 25-27 opening weekend, enough to reclaim first place from a horror reboot that, one week ago, put up the biggest debut in its franchise's history. That's the part of this story everyone already has. The part nobody else has bothered to check is where that $26 million actually ranks against every other time a studio has tried this exact trick, going back three decades. I checked. Disney did not throw the biggest rerelease party in box office history this weekend. It threw the second biggest, and the movie that beat it is the one thing in this entire article that isn't wearing a cape.
In Brief
- Avengers: Endgame Encore earned an estimated $26.0 million domestic ($86 million worldwide) over its Sept. 25-27 opening weekend, reclaiming the No. 1 spot from Resident Evil, which added $23.3 million in its second weekend to cross $103.4 million domestic.
- That $26.0 million is the second-largest domestic opening weekend ever recorded for a theatrical rerelease, behind only 2011's The Lion King 3D, which stunned Disney's own distribution team by opening to $29.3 million against an internal forecast of $10-12 million.
- I built a full historical comparison table of every major legacy rerelease since 1997 and handed out my own letter grade to each one, based on how far it beat expectations and how much of a lasting mark it left — not just the raw dollar figure.
The weekend that actually happened
Here's the top of the chart, because the context matters more than any single number: Endgame Encore took first with $26.0 million from 3,060 theaters, Resident Evil held second with $23.3 million from 3,684 theaters, and three brand-new wide releases packed themselves into the same crowded Friday — Paramount's Heart of the Beast opened to $20.0 million, A24's Primetime debuted to $19.2 million, and DreamWorks' Forgotten Island bowed softer than expected at $12.8 million despite reportedly strong word of mouth. Five movies within $13 million of each other on one weekend is not a normal spread, and it's the reason I don't think Encore's win should be read as a referendum on quality. Resident Evil didn't collapse; it dropped a perfectly ordinary amount for a horror movie in its second week and quietly crossed $100 million domestic, a real milestone for a video game adaptation. Encore didn't dominate; it won by less than $3 million against a seven-day-old movie, in a version of itself that's seven years old.
What actually separates the two is the incentive sitting underneath each ticket. Resident Evil's remaining audience is choosing whether to see a new movie for the first time. Encore's audience is choosing to see an old movie again, specifically because Disney bolted new Avengers: Doomsday setup onto the end of it — the same four leaked scenes I broke down here last week. A rerelease doesn't need to be good to win a weekend like this one. It just needs a reason that a first-time watch doesn't have, and "you haven't seen this part yet" turned out to be reason enough by almost $3 million.
Every legacy rerelease, ranked and graded
This is the part I actually built this article to do. Box office coverage treats every rerelease number as if it exists in a vacuum, and none of them do. So I pulled the domestic three-day opening weekend for every major theatrical rerelease I could verify since Titanic first went back to $2 billion in 2012, added The Lion King's earlier 3D run for context, and lined all six up against Encore. Then, because a raw dollar figure tells you almost nothing about whether a rerelease actually worked, I graded each one on my own scale — how far it beat what the studio itself expected going in, and whether it left anything behind beyond a single good weekend.
| Rerelease | Opening weekend | What made it happen | My grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| RereleaseThe Lion King 3D (Sept. 2011) | Opening weekend$29.3M | What made it happenPure format upgrade, no new footage. Disney privately forecast $10-12M and got triple that. | My gradeA+ |
| RereleaseAvengers: Endgame Encore (Sept. 2026) | Opening weekend$26.0M | What made it happenSix new minutes of Avengers: Doomsday setup, leaked footage acting as free advertising. | My gradeA- |
| RereleaseThe Phantom Menace 3D (Feb. 2012) | Opening weekend$22.5M | What made it happenFirst Star Wars prequel back in theaters in over a decade, riding pure nostalgia with no new content. | My gradeB+ |
| RereleaseTitanic 3D (Apr. 2012) | Opening weekend$17.3M | What made it happenA $10-15 million 3D conversion timed to the ship's 100th anniversary; pushed the film past $2 billion worldwide. | My gradeB |
| RereleaseAvatar 4K Remaster (Sept. 2022) | Opening weekend$10.5M | What made it happenTimed three months ahead of The Way of Water, leaned on international markets far more than domestic. | My gradeC+ |
| RereleaseTitanic 25th Anniversary (Feb. 2023) | Opening weekend$6.7M | What made it happenSecond Titanic rerelease in 11 years; a smaller anniversary run with a fraction of the 2012 theater count. | My gradeC |
| RereleaseAvatar: The Way of Water Rerelease (Oct. 2025) | Opening weekend$3.2M | What made it happenA quiet bridge to Avatar: Fire and Ash with no new footage attached; felt more contractual than eventful. | My gradeD+ |
Weekend figures per Box Office Mojo, Awards Radar, The Hollywood Reporter and contemporaneous wire reports at each release; grades are my own editorial judgment, not a measure endorsed by any studio.
A few things jump out once they're sitting next to each other like this. Every single rerelease on this list, without exception, opened smaller than the one before it — 2012 beat 2022, 2022 beat 2023, 2023 beat 2025 — until Endgame Encore showed up this weekend and broke that decade-long slide by a wide margin. Whatever else is true about this stunt, Marvel didn't just win a weekend against Resident Evil. It reversed a multi-year trend where the entire rerelease format looked like it was quietly dying.
Why a singing lion still beats the Avengers
I gave Lion King 3D the only A+ on this list on purpose, and I want to explain the grade instead of just handing it out. Every other rerelease here had something obvious working in its favor — new footage, an anniversary hook, a sequel three months out. Lion King 3D had none of that. Disney's own distribution chief told The Hollywood Reporter at the time that the studio internally projected somewhere between $10 million and $12 million, then watched the movie triple that number and become the first rerelease in fourteen years to open at No. 1, a streak going back to Return of the Jedi in 1997. Nobody added six new minutes. Nobody teased a movie three months out. A 17-year-old cartoon about a lion cub, converted to 3D, beat every new release in theaters that weekend combined, and it did it by accident, in the sense that the people releasing it didn't see it coming either.
That's the difference between a great rerelease and an engineered one. Encore is engineered extremely well — new footage, a real marketing hook, a release date picked to maximize competition with a horror movie's soft second weekend — and I don't think that's a knock against it. It's the more replicable version of this trick, which is exactly why Marvel keeps using it and Disney's Lion King team never got the chance to. But "replicable" and "biggest" aren't the same word, and until another studio manages an accidental triple-your-own-forecast weekend the way Lion King 3D did, I don't think anyone chasing this format gets to call themselves the champion of it. Marvel came the closest anyone's come in fifteen years. It still isn't the record.
