Over the past month, the conversation around “Avatar: The Way of Water” has shifted from, “Will it make money?” to “How much money will it make?” James Cameron‘s much-anticipated — or much-derided, depending on where you sit in the contemporary culture wars — was always expected to make money, but everyone has been shocked at its impact at the global box office. Once it became clear that the movie was going to outperform even its most ambitious expectations, the only question became whether this movie could possibly topple the original “Avatar.” And while that remains an open question, in at least one regard, Cameron’s sequel has already proven itself ahead of the pace.
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This weekend, “Avatar: The Way of Water” put itself in vaunted territory, crossing the $2B mark at the global box office. According to box office experts — whose math we will take on faith, because numbers are hard — this achievement also means that the film is trending ahead of its predecessor, hitting $2B a full six days in the release schedule ahead of “Avatar.” And with $1.4B at the international box office, the film is now the fourth-highest grossing movie of all time, sitting only behind “Titanic,” “Avengers: Endgame,” and the original “Avatar.” That’s a lot of James Cameron.
Granted, “Avatar: The Way of Water” still has a ways to go before it topples its predecessor at the domestic box office. According to The Numbers, the original “Avatar” ended its initial theatrical run at $760 million before tacking on another $23 million in its 2022 theatrical re-release. Through this weekend, “Avatar: The Way of Water” is sitting just shy of $598 million, meaning that Cameron’s sequel will need to hold steady for many more weeks if it wants to unseat the original. Of course, the theatrical landscape is much different in 2023 than it was in 2010, and international success is a much, much more important segment of the overall gross. “Avatar: The Way of Water” shows that, no matter how you feel about the cultural impact of this franchise, its impact with global audiences has hardly diminished with time.
