'Avengers: Endgame' director predicts movies will 'swing back hard' post-pandemic

Marvel Studios' "Avengers: Endgame" is the highest-grossing movie of all time, having made more than $2.79 billion at the global box office. The 2019 film was such a hit that even recordings of packed theater reactions to the movie's scenes went viral. However, that was the "before times."

Now, with the global COVID-19 pandemic, more than half of movie theaters in the U.S. are still shuttered, yet millions of cinema lovers are hungry for the moviegoing experience. YouTube comments show fans are re-watching the reaction videos now, just to remember what it was like.

Two lifelong movie fans who can't wait to get back to theaters are Joe and Anthony Russo, the sibling duo that directed 2014's "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," 2016's "Captain America: Civil War," 2018's "Avengers: Infinity War" and, of course, the aforementioned "Endgame."

"I do think that it's going to swing back hard," Joe Russo told ABC Audio. "I mean, any time something is withheld and then you get an opportunity to do it, you're going to do it a lot. And you look at the Chinese box office [where theaters are open]: from a week and a half ago, [it] broke all their records."

Looking back on the in-theater reactions to their films, he said, "We'd never been in a theater ... with that much energy ... [even at] the movies that we loved as children." It became, as he called it, "a global communal event."

"Everyone wanted to vocalize and participate ... and cheer and gasp and jump up and down. We'd never seen anything like that," Joe Russo added. "And I hope we get to experience that again in another film that ... we haven't directed. That we can just be fans of and sit and enjoy with everyone else."

Joe and Anthony Russo's new film, "Cherry," debuts on Apple TV+ on March 12.

Marvel is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News and "Good Morning America."