20th Century Studios/Disney’s Avatar: The Way of Water‘s Tuesday box office is looking at $17M, and could possibly topple Minions: Rise of Gru‘s first Tuesday of $17.5M to become the best Tuesday of 2022.
Some rival studios are seeing higher, but we’ll see how it settles come the morning. In its fifth day, the James Cameron directed sequel’s running domestic box office will rise to $167.3M.
I hear Avatar 2 has about $8M in pre-sales heading into the upcoming weekend, which is strong per one distribution source for a weekend 2 of a movie. Imax repped 14% of Avatar 2‘s $16M Monday box office which is up from the 12.3% indexing over the weekend.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story seems to be the current comp for Avatar 2. That Lucasfilm title minted $17.5M on its first Tuesday, which Avatar 2 could best. Rogue One also saw a second 4-day weekend of $96.1M, which was the last time Christmas fell on a Sunday, just like this year. It’s a number that Avatar 2 could feasibly reach in its Friday-Monday span next weekend.
The first Avatar saw its second weekend occur also over a Christmas frame, except the holiday fell on a Friday (which is better than the holiday falling on a Saturday or Sunday). The movie in 2009 only dipped 1.8% in weekend 2 with $75.6M compared to its opening 3-day of $77M. Amazing.
Globally, Avatar 2 will fly past the half billion point today. The sequel helped propel Disney past the $4 billion worldwide office point this year; the most to date for any studio.
You can read the rest of our Christmas box office coverage here; the only other new wide release that has a shot of grossing north of $100M ultimately this season is Universal/Dreamworks Animation’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish which opens tomorrow, sans previews tonight. That Joel Crawford-Januel Mercado directed sequel is looking at a 4-day between $15M-$20M.