Let the Avatar 2 Craze Begin: Projected Opening Box Office is Mind-Blowing Already
Twice as much as the original Avatar in 2009 – that is the opening weekend box office forecast for Avatar: The Way of the Water.
Film industry trade publication Boxoffice Pro has released a report on James Cameron 's Avatar sequel, which will premiere on December 16 and is projected to earn $135 million domestically in its opening weekend, compared to Avatar's $77 million.
At the same time, Boxoffice Pro's prediction for the sequel's domestic total is $475 million, which is about half of what Avatar made domestically.
So far it seems Avatar: The Way of the Water is unlikely to beat James Cameron's 2009 Avatar, the highest-grossing film to date, which earned nearly $3 billion, but who knows?
The sequel cost about $250 million to produce, making it one of the most expensive movies ever made. It stars the original cast, including Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang, as well as some new faces like Kate Winslet, Michelle Yeoh and Vin Diesel. The movie will follow the adventures of Jake Sully and Neytiri's newfound family of five children 15 years after the events of the original Avatar. They struggle to stay together as a family, but the infamous, powerful and wealthy RDA forces the family to flee to the Pandoran Oceans.
While the first Avatar captured the hearts and minds of millions worldwide, some fans doubt that Cameron will be able to make the sequel as successful. After watching the trailers, many of them seem to agree that it is the same old story of greedy humans versus honest aliens. The cast is almost the same and the aliens are blue.
"I'm not buying tickets just to see good CGI," says one commenter in the Avatar: The Way of the Water thread on Reddit. But everyone agrees that when James Cameron gets down to business, he means business. The results are always stunning, and cinephiles are treated to something high-quality and large-scale that allows the filmmaker, dubbed the "king of sequels" by the Reddit gang, to cash in.
There is a long-term vision for the Avatar franchise. There are even more releases planned for 2024, 2026 and 2028. But as Cameron told Total Film in early November, he will keep an eye on the box office. Avatar 3 will be a litmus test for whether it makes sense to continue the franchise.
"The market could be telling us we're done in three months, or we might be semi-done, meaning: 'OK, let's complete the story within movie three, and not go on endlessly', if it's just not profitable," Cameron said.