Avatar Ends Box-Office Silent Nights - Weeks 4, 5 & 6

Thanks to James Cameron, we knocked off everything on our “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” list all in one weekend!

Avatar: The Way of Water swam into theaters last weekend and found a $134 million opening at the bottom of the pool. It was the 5th biggest opening of the year and woke-up movie theaters that had been seeing little excitement beyond Black Panther 2 return viewers. It also got theater owners to break-out those 3D glasses that had been collecting dust since Gravity in 2013 (at least, that’s the last time I remember wearing 3D glasses during a film). 

While the opening itself is not spectacular spectacular (as they’d say in the Moulin Rouge), it may play out exactly as the last two James Cameron-helmed blockbusters. Both Titanic and the first Avatar had modest openings and then they just never stopped making money for weeks on end. Whereas most big debuts drop-off 60% in their second weekend, Titanic actually went up 24% and Avatar 1 only dropped 2% after a $77 million start. Will the same happen this time or have the digitally created wonders of Pandora become passé?  

In what passes as other box-office news, the holly jolly and bloody Violent Night has become a minor hit (and turned a profit off a $20 million budget) to have grossed $35 million over its three weeks in release. That Violent Night would’ve made more money than Strange World this season is very strange indeed. Yay for quirky films finding their audience. 

The final players of the season will be coming out this weekend and we’ll see if Puss in Boots and Babylon have anything to say about the final Top 5 of the season. At this point the creepy robot movie M3GAN has as much chance to crack the Top 5 as anything else and it only has 10 days in the theater before MLK day. There looks to be lots of low hanging fruit there, which is usually where our poolers live: low. 

The Top Five If Today Was MLK Day:

#1. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - $418.9 million

#2. Avatar: The Way of Water - $134.1 million

#3. Violent Night - $35 million

#4. Strange World - $33.8 million

#5. The Menu - $32.1 million