How Long Is Avengers: Doomsday? Every Avengers Movie from Shortest to Longest

As surely the least rewatched of any Avengers movie, it makes sense that Age of Ultron is also the shortest of them—if only by a couple of minutes. Released just three years after the first Avengers and with only a handful of new superheroes added to the mix in that time, this was really more of a run-of-the-mill MCU movie than the epic team-ups that came before or after.

In Ultron, the movie has a formidable villain. There are also a few iconic scenes and a climactic battle that proved influential on the franchise’s overall narrative. Still, without the freshness of the 2012 original or the epic scale of later outings, 141 minutes feels just about right.

Now here was a movie that had to do a lot of groundwork in a relatively short space of time—and credit to Joss Whedon and his team for pulling it off with such humour and style.

The Tesseract and Loki had already been introduced the previous year in Thor. However, for Avengers to work, Whedon still had to reintroduce the Hulk and get him into a room with Tony Stark, an unfrozen super soldier from World War II, and a Norse god, and have them interact in a believable, funny yet still dramatic way.

That they all managed to achieve this while also delivering two massive action sequences along the way leaves the movie’s 143 minutes looking quite succinct.

Perhaps similar to what we might see in Doomsday, Infinity War is a movie of epic proportions that, when you think about it, probably takes place over a couple of days.

We begin with Thor and Hulk in space and Iron Man, Dr Strange and Spider-Man on Earth, but end with them swapped around. In that time, Thanos collects four of the six Infinity Stones as a resistance is formed on Earth, all of which builds to an epic showdown on the plains of Wakanda. 

That's a whole lot of movie, but it races along with such narrative momentum that you barely notice its two and a half hours go by.

While we're talking about time, consider that when Avengers: Doomsday is released this December, it will be almost eight years since audiences have seen a new Avengers movie. To put that in perspective, the first four Avengers movies were released in less than seven years. With that in mind, it’s going to take more than a few ropey trailers to kill the hype.

At the time of writing, most things seem to be pointing towards an Infinity War-type lay-up for Secret Wars. We're guessing that it will take place over the course of a day or so and end with the Avengers (or their variants) either siding with Dr Doom’s plans (whatever they may be) or coming together to form a resistance. 

Given the number of characters involved, 165 minutes makes all kinds of sense.

As the crowning, climatic, cherry on top of a decade's worth of intricate storytelling, it’s only fair that 2019’s Avengers: Endgame is still by far the longest movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Among other reasons, the movie's 181-minute running time was justified by the fact that the story took place not only over five and a half years, but also with plenty of time-jumping antics that took it as far back as 1970—and even earlier, lest we forget, for the movie’s final shot.

Along with being an action spectacle and a clever victory lap through some of the franchise's best bits, this was also a movie that managed to satisfyingly close the long-running character arcs of some of its most beloved heroes.

We'll have to see if it still holds the number one spot when Secret Wars is released late next year.