After an excellent second weekend at the box office, where it ended up exceeding projections by quite a bit, director James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water has shot past the $950 million mark at the global box office to become the third-biggest film of the year. With $293 million domestically and another $661 million from overseas markets, the long-awaited science-fiction sequel has now made $955 million worldwide.
This takes the film past the lifetime global tally of Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and puts it at the third spot behind Jurassic World Dominion ($1.003 billion) and Top Gun: Maverick ($1.488 billion) on the 2022 list. The Way of Water will overtake Dominion (and $1 billion) before it enters its third weekend of release, and is currently expected to finish as the top-performing film of 2022 when all is said and done.
It is, however, still unclear if the film can hit the high threshold for success that Cameron has publicly set for it. The filmmaker has said The Way of Water was so expensive to produce — reports put the budget north of $400 million — that it will need to finish as the third or fourth-biggest film of all time to break even. This translates to around $2 billion in global box office revenue.
And even though The Way of Water didn’t hold as well as the first Avatar on a weekend-to-weekend basis, it still managed to exceed expectations at the domestic box office by nearly $10 million — that’s a lot. With little competition in the next couple of months — at least not until Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania drops — The Way of Water has a clear runway ahead of it.
Buoyed by positive word-of-mouth and the “event-movie” status that was so beneficial to the first movie as well, The Way of Water is currently showing strong legs over the holiday season. The first Avatar, released in 2009, famously had a rather muted debut at the domestic box office, but went on to dominate the marketplace for months. It ultimately finished as the highest-grossing movie of all time. Accounting for the several re-releases over the last decade, the film has made $785 million stateside and $2.9 billion globally. It was briefly overtaken as the biggest movie in history by Avengers: Endgame, before reclaiming the title shortly afterwards. At the same stage in its domestic run, the first Avatar had made $232 million.
The sequel takes place over a decade after the events of the first film, and follows the protagonists Jake Sully and Neytiri as they flee a familiar threat and seek refuge among the water clans of the tropical world of Pandora. Cameron spent years tinkering with the technology necessary for the sequel, and is presenting the film in state-of-the-art fluctuating High Frame Rate.
The Way of Water’s $955 million haul puts it just outside the top 50 all-time list, behind The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug ($959 million) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End ($960 million). The film’s biggest international territories are China ($104 million despite a new COVID outbreak), South Korea ($25 million), France ($21 million) and Australia ($20 million).
You can watch our interview with producer Jon Landau below, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.