'Avatar' Has Disappointing Debut

Avatar: The Way of Water was expected to wake up the theater business and deliver the biggest premiere of the year this weekend. That didn't happen. The long-awaited sequel to the highest-grossing movie in history did big business, but its opening-weekend ticket sales were only the fifth highest of 2022. That's not good news for a movie with Avatar's budget, and the film will have to continue to do good business for a long time if it wants to turn a profit. Read on for details.

Via Box Office Mojo.

After a 13 year gap, Avatar: The Way of Water is finally here. James Cameron’s first of many planned sequels to Avatar, the world’s highest grossing film of all time (which itself topped Cameron’s own Titanic as the highest grossing film of all time), opened below expectations with $134 million. Yes, this is still a huge opening, but it is not the sort of start you would hope for on a film that, as Cameron claims, would “have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history” to break even. With that said (and whether or not that statement regarding the film’s breakeven point is fully accurate), this is not a film to count out, and it could see strong numbers for the rest of the year and well into the new year. Either way, it’s great to have a heavy hitter back in theaters again, and Avatar: TWOW led an overall box office of $152 million, making this the second highest grossing weekend of the past five months.

There are a few ways of looking at the opening of The Way of Water, and they boil down to the question of if Avatar 2 will end up as a typical huge blockbuster or if it plays like another James Cameron box office phenomenon. On one hand, it’s “just” the fifth best opening of the year and 37th biggest of all time, tied with The Batman (though it may end up over or under once the actuals come out) but not exactly numbers fit for the sequel to the film that broke nearly every box office record in the books. On the other hand, it’s the sixth best opening ever for December, the month’s best non-MCU and non-Star Wars opening, 74% ahead of the first Avatar ($77 million) and 5.5% ahead of this year’s own box office champ Top Gun: Maverick ($127 million). If it plays like The Batman, which went on to gross $369 million (a 2.8 multiplier, better legs than any of this year’s MCU films), then it’d be hard not to be underwhelmed by the sequel, even putting aside its allegedly gargantuan budget (such a finish would be less than half of the first Avatar’s $750 million cume in its original release). However, playing closer to Top Gun: Maverick, which had a 5.7 multiplier and grossed $719 million, is not out of the question, which would consequently put it in the league of Cameron’s other box office smashes. Ending up somewhere in between seems like the likeliest bet, but it’s ultimately too early to make any calls on this one.

We’ll get a better sense of the film’s fate over the next two weeks which can essentially play like a giant long weekend with Christmas falling next Sunday, New Year’s the following Sunday, and plenty of days off school and work between now and then. There’s reason to believe the legs on TWOW will be unusually strong. For one, around 1/5th of the film’s presales are post-opening weekend, compared to a negligible amount on the typical big blockbuster. We’re also already seeing concrete signs that this is less front-loaded than the average franchise film, with Saturday’s gross coming in at 16% below Friday’s. That’s the best Saturday hold for a $100+ million opener since Frozen II in 2019 which actually grew 19% in its second day of release (for comparison’s sake, Top Gun: Maverick dropped 27% Friday to Saturday and Spider-Man: No Way Home dropped 39%). No big blockbusters are coming out until Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania releases on February 17th, and while that’s no guarantee of strong legs, it does mean TWOW has the premium screens largely to itself for two months.

Get the rest of the story at Box Office Mojo.