Avatar: The Way of Water is a runaway financial success, but it would have been far less successful if the box office predictions had all been correct. Box office forecasts for Avatar: The Way of Water have continually missed the mark because they're treating it like a typical box office hit, when a closer look at its box office performance reveals it's behaving by a totally different set of rules.
As the 13-year belated sequel to the highest-grossing movie of all time, there was a lot of scrutiny on Avatar: The Way of Water's box office potential. Opening weekend projections were a fairly modest $150 million, but the actual opening was deemed a disappointment for "only" earning $134 million. After that, Avatar 2's week-to-week projections have had the opposite problem of under-estimating its box office potential, leading to confusion over how Avatar: The Way of Water keeps earning so much money, especially after it became the highest-grossing movie released in 2022.
Why Avatar: The Way of Water Box Office Projections Overestimated Its Opening Weekend
Box office analysis relies on a variety of data and historical trends and is generally a reliably accurate process, but its reliance on averages can give projections a bias towards more typical box office behavior, creating blind spots for anomalies like Avatar: The Way of Water. Modern successful blockbusters typically see big opening weekends followed by big decreases week-over-week. In 2022, the top 10 domestic earners averaged $126.7 million opening weekend, but the top five openings averaged $158.4 million, while the top 10 movies of all time was $198.4 million. Avatar: The Way of Water's original $150 million projection was in-line with this, but only opened to $134 million.
It's logical to assume big opening weekends are necessary for top box office success, but that's never been the case with James Cameron. The original Avatar and Titanic have the two lowest openings out of the top 10 all-time box office earners by a significant margin, yet both became the highest grossing movie of all time, with Titanic falling to rank third 25 years later, while Avatar still holds its top spot 13 years later. Since Avatar and Titanic are box office outliers, it's hard to treat them as the expectation in any analysis or projections, but their huge success and the fact that they're Cameron's last two movies is also impossible to ignore.
Box Office Projections Keep Underestimating Avatar's Weekly Box Office Potential
While most top 10 movies opened to massive box office hauls, it accounts for a significant portion of their overall box office run. On average, the top 10 box office earners made 29 percent of their total domestic haul on their opening weekend. Excluding James Cameron's movies from the list, the average jumps to 35 percent. Avatar's opening weekend only accounts for 10 percent of its total lifetime gross, while Titanic's opening weekend only accounts for four percent of its lifetime gross. Of the non-Cameron movies, the best legs in the top 10 belong to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which earned 26 percent of its total during its opening weekend.
Avatar: The Way of Water's weekly box office performance is also skewed by its release date. Since 2022's Christmas and New Year's Day were both on a Sunday, weekend saw bigger surges, extended even more by many people also getting the following Monday off work. The last big release to see this was Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which many box office analyses used as a comp. Avatar: The Way of Water behaved far more like Rogue One than other blockbusters, only Rogue One opened higher to $155 million and Avatar 2 was already outpacing it day-to-day by its 10th day of release, gaining and then expanding its lead.
While movies like Avengers: Endgame earn the majority of their box office in the first few weeks, Avatar: The Way of Water is behaving more like its predecessor, which earned the majority of its box office in later weeks. For example, by its third week of release, Avengers: Endgame had already earned 86 percent of its total domestic haul, while Avatar had only earned 51 percent of its domestic haul by the end of its third week. We won't know the full distribution of Avatar: The Way of Water's box office until it's all said and done, but so far it leans far closer to Avatar than Avengers: Endgame.
James Cameron's Unique Box Office Effect
This isn't the first time a James Cameron movie has behaved this way. His movies typically cost more than people think they should and perform stronger than people think they will. To be fair, the performance of his movies is such an anomaly that using something more predictable like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story may seem like a far safer bet, but the only other movies that exhibit behavior similar to Avatar: the Way of Water are the original Avatar and Titanic. More recently Top Gun: Maverick has done similar things, but not to the same extent.
Avatar is only a few weeks in, but at this same point in its run, Titanic had only made 28 percent of its total box office and as mentioned the original Avatar was barely halfway to its total box office. For contrast, Top Gun: Maverick had only earned 58 percent of its domestic haul by its third weekend. If Avatar: The Way of Water's third week accounts for 58 percent of its domestic like Top Gun Maverick, then its total domestic haul will come to $968.7 million, beating Star Wars: The Force Awakens' all-time record of $936.7 million.
Then there's international box office. Top Gun: Maverick's $718.7 million domestic box office only accounted for 48 percent of its total global earnings, while Avatar and Titanic's domestic earnings were only 30 percent, and Avatar: The Way of Water is on the same track. If that trend holds, Avatar: The Way of Water's total global box office would be $3.2 billion, becoming the new highest-grossing movies of all time at the global box office and the first movie to earn more than $3 billion. Granted, it's not entirely clear if its domestic legs will be equivalent to Top Gun: Maverick's, this is merely a hypothetical example of its potential.
While Avatar: The Way of Water's box office performance has far more in common with Titanic and Avatar's box office than other big blockbusters, there's also some major differences, so they don't necessarily make the movie's box office any easier to predict. Whether Avatar: The Way of Water can continue its strong performance and become the top grossing movie of all time remains to be seen, but it's already on the top 10 all-time list with many weeks of earning potential remaining, so a run for the top spot is hardly out of the question.