Avatar: The Way of Water Box Office Opening Weekend Tracking at Over Half A Billion

After over a decade away, the Avatar franchise is finally headed back to the big screen this coming weekend — and it looks like it might have a pretty monumental impact. According to the newest box office projections, Avatar: The Way of Water is on track to gross $525 million in its opening weekend. These projections hypothetically include $175 million domestic, and $350 million overseas. This would be monumentally beyond the first film’s domestic opening weekend performance of only $77 million in 2009.

Avatar: The Way of Water will be the long-awaited follow-up to director James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar, which has the distinction of being the highest-grossing film of all time. It is one of several sequels that Cameron has planned for the franchise.

“The market could be telling us we’re done in three months, or we might be semi-done, meaning: ‘Okay, let’s complete the story within movie three, and not go on endlessly,’ if it’s just not profitable,” Cameron explained in a recent interview. “We’re in a different world now than we were when I wrote this stuff, even. It’s the one-two punch – the pandemic and streaming. Or, conversely, maybe we’ll remind people what going to the theater is all about. This film definitely does that. The question is: how many people give a s*** now?”

What is Avatar 2 about?

Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, Avatar: The Way of Water begins to tell the story of the Sully family, the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure. The film will see the return of Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Giovanni Ribisi, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Joel David Moore, Dileep Rao, CCH Pounder, and Matt Gerald. New cast members include Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Edie Falco, Brendan Cowell, Michelle Yeoh, Jemaine Clement, Oona Chaplin, David Thewlis, and CJ Jones.

“The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis,” Cameron previously shared with Total Film about The Way of Water. “I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character, more on story, more on relationships, more on emotion. We didn’t spend as much time on relationship and emotion in the first film as we do in the second film, and it’s a longer film, because there’s more characters to service. There’s more story to service.”

Are you excited for Avatar: The Way of Water? What do you think of these new box office projections? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Avatar: The Way of Water is currently scheduled to be released exclusively in theaters on December 16th.