Avatar: The Way of Water has firmly broken its way into the top 10 highest grossing global movies of all time, following in the footsteps of the record-breaking original from 2009, a positive sign for the movie-making industry.
At the worldwide box office, Avatar 2 is now up to $1.7bn, making it the biggest cinematic release of 2022. In the US, however, its $517m takings haven’t quite been enough to knock Top Gun: Maverick off the top spot — though it’s tracking to do so based on the first 24 days of the movie’s release. Whether Avatar maintains the trajectory to get past Tom Cruise & Co. will be interesting, as Top Gun 2 had a remarkably long cinema shelf-life.
The way of the sequel
As discussed in our annual summary, 2022 in 5 Charts, every one of the 10 biggest movies of last year were either franchise sequels, spin-offs, or reboots — with the highest-grossing original coming in the form of biopic Elvis. So it's no surprise that plans are already in place for Avatar 3, 4 and 5.
However, a small part of director James Cameron may have thought he might not end up making the later sequels, as The Way of Water needed to become one of the highest grossing of all time just to break even. With that milestone ticked, Cameron stated in an interview that "[the film] will easily pass our break even in the next few days, so it looks like I can’t wiggle out of this, I’m gonna have to do these other sequels". Looks like Disney has another mega-franchise on its hands.
