Weekend predictions: Avatar eyeing $170-million opening

December 16, 2022

Avatar: The Way of Water

Avatar: The Way of Water is finally here. James Cameron’s epic is expected to dominate at the box office well into the New Year and rack up hundreds of millions of dollars domestically (not to mention potentially billions worldwide) in the process. Exactly how many hundreds is the question, of course. Expectations for its opening weekend have been hovering around $150 million for quite a while, and ticked a little higher in the lead up to its release. Our final analysis points to around $170 million. But, as I’ll explain, that comes with a lot of caveats.

Predicting the opening for Avatar 2 is challenging because it’s not quite like anything else in the market. While it’s a big-budget sci-fi epic, it doesn’t fall neatly alongside films from the major franchises (with the arguable exception of Jurassic World, whose latest incarnation opened with $145 million over the Summer).

Most major franchises are looking to get you to inhabit their world while the studio spawns spin-off movies, TV shows, collectibles, toys, comic books, and whatever else they find makes them a buck. James Cameron’s movies are more like a vacation: he wants to entertain you for a few hours so much that you tell your friends what a great time you had, and perhaps come back a couple more times yourself. But his movies are more self-contained (not to mention rarer!) than other franchises, and that makes them harder to analyze.

Cameron himself does have a long track record though, and one way to look at the potential of Way of Water is to look at how his previous films have opened.

In the chart above, I’ve included the actual opening weekend for each of the movies he has directed that got a wide release, and also the opening weekend adjusted for ticket price inflation. (There hasn’t been an “official” average ticket price announcement since the pandemic, but I used an estimate of $10 for the current average ticket price—more on that in the New Year.) Dividing by the number of theaters each film opened in gives us an adjusted average per theater, which has been pretty stable for his films since Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Using that as the basis for a prediction puts the expected opening weekend for Avatar 2 at $118.7 million, given its opening in 4,202 theaters. If it matches Terminator 2 it’ll do around $139 million, by the way.

As a sanity check, I also figured out where each of his films’ opening weekend ranked that year. Terminator 2 actually had the biggest opening of 1991, while Titanic had the seventh-best opening of 1997, and the original Avatar had the sixth-best opening of 2009. If Way of Water posts $118 million, it’ll have the seventh-best opening of 2022.

So, if you told me only that James Cameron had a new movie out this weekend, and that it was playing in 4,202 theaters, I’d be pretty happy with a prediction that it would earn around $118 million.

But this is Avatar: The Way of Water, the sequel to the top-grossing movie of all time. Is there a better way to make a prediction?

Well Disney have very helpfully provided some comparisons to other recent releases based on how Way of Water has done over its first two days internationally.

Avatar: The Way of Water is earning 2.67 times what Avatar did over its first two days when comparing like-to-like territories. It’s also running 72% ahead of Top Gun: Maverick, and 52% ahead of Jurassic World: Dominion. If it similarly outperforms those films domestically, and it continues at the same pace into the weekend, it’ll earn a little more than $200 million on opening weekend. The safer comparison is probably Spider-Man: No Way Home though. Way of Water is running 39% behind that film, which happened to open on the same weekend last year. If that’s a good marker, then we should see an opening weekend around $159 million.

The final piece of evidence came this morning when Disney announced that Way of Water earned $17 million from previews on Thursday. Here’s how that stacks up with the other big releases of 2022:

The median multiplier for films earning over $10 million from previews this year has been 7.81, which would translate into an opening weekend of $132.8 million for Avatar 2. It’s likely to have good legs through the weekend, based on its strong audience reaction and lack of a massive “fangirl/fanboy” effect. If it matches Jurassic World: Dominion’s legs it’ll make $137 million this weekend. If it can track the performance of Top Gun: Maverick it’ll make $145 million.

As usual, our final prediction is a weighted average of our predictions. In this case, I think it makes most sense to average the prediction based on the international numbers with the prediction based on the previews, which gives us a final number of $172 million.

Note the huge range of uncertainty though. I’d be surprised if the film ended with weekend with less than $130 million, and astonished if it did more than $200 million, but both figures are within the bounds of possibility. Even once we know where it has landed over the weekend, its ultimate financial fate will be determined by how it does next weekend and the weekend after (and the weekend after that, most likely), not just here in North America but around the world.

So far, the news looks good. But the jury will be out for at least a couple more months. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from doing box office analysis since the original release of Titanic, it’s not to bet against James Cameron.

Here’s what our model thinks the top 10 as a whole will look like. This weekend is all Avatar.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, Top Gun: Maverick, Jurassic Park, James Cameron