'Avatar' sequel swamps holiday box office, nears $890M worldwide
A stormy holiday weekend at the box office did little to slow down the season's biggest sequel, though it did crimp receipts for rival entries that suffered from low attention.
Avatar: The Way of Water (NYSE:DIS) used not the traditionally weak Christmas Eve, but a big turnout on Sunday's Christmas Day and the Monday after to draw an estimated $82M domestically for the four-day weekend, easily repeating as the nation's top film (as it's expected to do for some time).
That brings the cumulative two-week domestic take to $287M - the year's fourth-best film over the time span of its release behind Top Gun: Maverick (PARA) (PARAA), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (DIS) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (DIS).
The Avatar sequel added another $52M internationally on Monday alone - and with just short of $602M overseas, the film is knocking on the door of $890M total worldwide grosses.
As a large-format blockbuster, it's certainly a friend to IMAX (NYSE:IMAX), whose stock is up 2.7% after it said Avatar 2's $105.5M in IMAX box office makes it the fastest film to an IMAX-related $100M since early 2019 (and only IMAX's ninth ever film to $100M).
Despite showing on only a fraction of Avatar's screen count, IMAX made up for 11.4% of the film's global gross (and more than 25% of the grosses in China, on only 1% of the screen count).
The challenge of that film's success combined with storms that snarled holiday weekend travel was too much for three new films to overcome. A distant second was animated film Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (NASDAQ:CMCSA), with $12.4M; and third was biographical picture Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody (SONY), with $4.77M.
Meanwhile, the expensive and musical golden-age Hollywood epic Babylon (PARA) (PARAA) flopped with just $3.6M despite showing on more than 3,300 screens (hurt by a tricky subject and three-hour-plus runtime).
Stock in Avatar's studio, Disney (DIS), was down 1.9%. A few cinema stocks moved higher Tuesday, though AMC is its own animal: AMC Entertainment (NYSE:AMC) -7.1%; Cineworld (OTCPK:CNNWQ); Cinemark (CNK) +2.5%; (IMAX) +2.7%; Marcus (MCS) +1.4%; Reading International (RDI) -2.4%; Cineplex (CGX:CA) -2.8% in Toronto; National CineMedia (NCMI) -8.9%.