Earlier this week, analysts predicted Avatar: The Way of Water would easily clear the one billion dollar mark less than two weeks after its premiere, and the movie did just that on Tuesday, as opposed to the Top Gun sequel that needed a full month to reach said number. Overall, Top Gun: Maverick earned Paramount Pictures a whopping $1.48b in revenue, although for that to happen it did need an extended theatrical window and a recent rerelease in the United States.
With Variety reporting slightly over $1.1b in movie ticket sales heading into the final weekend of the year, Avatar: The Way of Water now looks set to pass Top Gun’s total box office in January 2023, and not only that, the film has already proven to be much more successful outside the U.S. with a $762.8m chunk coming from overseas. Comparatively speaking, Top Gun: Maverick’s international box office peaked at $770m, netting most of its gains in domestic territory ($718m) with Avatar 2 clearly not becoming as popular among American audiences as it has less than half of that ($337.8m) and no realistic chance of coming close.
Along with Jurassic World: Dominion, these two were the only movies in 2022 that made over a billion dollars, though it bears saying that a large part of The Way of Water’s overseas revenue comes from China, where the franchise is incredibly popular. Unlike its competition, Top Gun: Maverick was banned by Chinese censors due to its patriotic, militaristic and pro-American themes, as well as its implicit recognition of Taiwan as an independent country.
Regardless of these impressive figures, and all inflationary adjustments aside too, the return of billionaire blockbusters will bode well for Hollywood as a whole since it shows clear signs of recovery from the industry’s pandemic slowdown. In 2021, no movie other than Spider-Man: No Way Home accomplished this feat, and even if three is still a lot less than 2019’s nine billion-dollar earners this is a much better landscape for all the highly anticipated sequels coming in 2023, albeit looming uncertainty over China’s policies towards cultural imports.
Partiuclarly, James Cameron will be pleased by Avatar 2’s performance, as the movie is set to go down as one of the most expensive ever, and it also needs to crack a place among the top earners if it hopes in order to become profitable. 2 billion might be too big of a stretch for Avatar, but the sequel has proven that if Cameron films it, people will come.
Avatar: The Way of Water is currently available in theaters.
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