‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Sails to $950 Million Worldwide

With a massive audience on Christmas Day, “Avatar: The Way of Water” grossed $955.1 million worldwide, breaking yet another box office record.

20th Century and Disney’s films performed better than anticipated over the holiday weekend. Monday’s enormous 31.5 million domestic and 52.2 million foreign grosses brought the worldwide and global totals to 293 and 661 million, respectively, for James Cameron’s long-awaited sequel. 

The Way of Water earned an impressive $168.6 million over the three-day Christmas holiday, bringing its international total to $601.7 million through Sunday. This includes more than $100 million from China. The global tally reached $661.9 million by the end of Monday (Boxing Day).

Movies like Minions: The Rise of Gru ($939 million), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ($800 million), The Batman ($770 million), and Thor: Love and Thunder ($760 million) have all been surpassed by “The Way of Water” in just two weeks at the worldwide box office. Currently, it is tied for third place with “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” ($955.7 million worldwide) for the highest-grossing film of the year.

The first Avatar, released in 2009, had a relatively quiet domestic box office debut but went on to dominate the market for months. It eventually became the highest-grossing film of all time. Including re-releases over the last decade, the film has grossed $785 million in the United States and $2.9 billion worldwide.

This is because the global box office has not completely recovered from the epidemic, and significant regions such as China are facing a virus recurrence. In addition, The Way of Water will not include the original film’s revenue-generating territory of Russia in the scope of the sequel’s distribution which was $100 million.

Over a decade after the first film’s events, Jake Sully and Neytiri return in the sequel to seek safety among the water tribes of the tropical continent of Pandora as they run from a familiar threat. Cameron spent a long time perfecting the technology for the sequel, and now the picture is being shown in cutting-edge, wildly varying High Frame Rate.

Imax audiences have flocked to see “The Way of Water” again, just like they did with the first film. It has already made over $105.5 million worldwide on Imax screens, making it the company’s fastest picture to reach that level in the post-pandemic era. To date, 11.4% of the film’s worldwide revenue has come from Imax screenings.

Avatar: The Way of Water‘s box office haul of $955.1 million places it just outside the top 50 all-time films in revenue. The international markets that have brought in the most revenue for the movie include China ($104 million), South Korea ($25 million), France ($21 million), and Australia ($20 million). Nevertheless, there is a significant COVID-19 outbreak in Beijing, which has led to the closure of a number of theaters. During its initial run in the country, the original version of Avatar brought in more than $200 million.

After having been in theaters for a little over a week, the Imax edition of “Avatar: The Way of Water” has already amassed more than $100 million in revenue and shows no signs of slowing down.