After three pandemic-battered years at the box office, Hollywood desperately wanted Avatar: The Way of Water, the sequel to the top-grossing film on record, to arrive like a ticket-selling tsunami. Surveys that track audience interest suggested that The Way of Water could arrive to as much as $175 million in opening-weekend ticket sales in the United States and Canada.
It was not to be.
The ultraexpensive event movie collected about $134 million at North American theaters over its first three days, according to Comscore, which compiles ticketing data. Directed by James Cameron and revisiting the fantasy world of Pandora, The Way of Water cost Disney an estimated $600 million to make and market. Three more sequels are planned.
But there may still be a way for The Way of Water to become a big, blue juggernaut — possibly even surpassing the $2 billion in global sales that Cameron publicly set as the benchmark for financial success, given the film’s stratospheric production and marketing costs. Consider what happened with the first Avatar in 2009. It arrived to a soft $77 million and went on to gross $2.9 billion worldwide.
The Way of Water also arrived in cinemas in almost every international market over the weekend, collecting an additional $300.5 million, for a healthy global opening total of $434.5 million, according to Disney. It was the second-highest global opening for the year, behind Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
The top international market for The Way of Water was China, where the movie arrived to $57.1 million in ticket sales, despite restrictions on theater capacity in some major cities because of coronavirus outbreaks.
The Way of Water, an ecological parable that is a hybrid of live-action footage and specialized animation, has a marathon run time of three hours and 12 minutes, which may have been too much of a commitment for some people on the weekend before Christmas. But most box office analysts do not see length as a problem for The Way of Water in the long run, in part because reviews have been quite positive. Ticket buyers gave the movie an A grade in CinemaScore exit polls.