Earlier this week, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water became the No. 5 highest-grossing movie ever worldwide, and, as expected, has now surfed to the No. 4 position on the all-time chart. In so doing, it leaves Star Wars: The Force Awakens in its wake with nearly $2.075B globally.
Through Friday, the worldwide gross on the 20th Century Studios/Disney/Lightstorm epic Avatar sequel is $2,074.8M, overtaking Force Awakens’ $2.071B. This means that Cameron has three of the top four movies ever globally alongside the original Avatar at No. 1 and Titanic at No. 3. Avatar: The Way of Water will top Titanic in the coming week or so on a global basis. However, Paramount is doing a Titanic domestic rerelease in time for Valentine’s Day, and Disney is also handling offshore before Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania gets going, so there could be some jockeying ahead as we noted on Thursday.
For Disney, the recent Avatar milestones mean the studio has released three of the top five global titles ever (including Avengers: Endgame at No. 2, while Fox back in the day, before it was under the Disney umbrella, released the first Avatar).
At the international box office, Best Picture Oscar nominee Way of Water is still No. 4 of all time with $1,466.3M through Friday. Domestically, it is No. 13 at $608.5M.
Through Friday, the sci-fi adventure’s top overseas markets are: China ($235.4M), France ($133.2M), Germany ($120.2M), Korea ($101.5M), the UK ($83.5M), India ($58.3M), Australia ($57.5M), Mexico ($52.3M), Spain ($48.1M) and Italy ($45.8M).