Wild. I think most pundits were predicting $100m+. Still, gonna do very well and it’s big Jim. Never bet against him.
Yeah it’s a little low domestically but overseas it’s a huge opening. Highest opening day of 2025 for a dozen countries. Will be curious to see if this has the mileage to get to $2 B
That was also 2009. Adjusted the first Avatar would be about $115 million. The legs were insane though. Only movie to rival it is Titanic
(Deleted original post because I had the wrong chart but) The Greatest Showman, a movie I have not seen
Should also be noted that Way of Water basically had no competition, where this was going against the new Angel Studio movie that did well, SpongeBob and the Sydney Sweeney/Amanda Seyfried movie.
Going to see James Cameron films has pretty much always meant that you were going to see a movie that pushed what is possible to witness in a film, even if the story itself is trite. Aliens retreaded the same territory as the original classic, but while that film was very clearly a tall guy in a costume, Cameron's sequel upped the numbers and gave us much more striking and imposing situations and a new monster. The Abyss was a pioneer in CGI, but he really showed everyone else what the technology was capable of in Terminator 2, which was essentially the same film as the original but swapping protagonists. Titanic and its' love triangle was not new to anyone, but his attention to detail and craftsmanship made you feel like you were there, enjoying the opulence of first class, smelling the sweat and bodies huddled in third class, and freezing in the water during the escape. Of course, then we get to Avatar, which anyone who had ever seen a movie before could connect the story to Fern Gully or Pocahantas or Dancing with Wolves or any other version of the story of a person falling in with the natives. However, what made the film such a success and what has spawned this franchise was that, for the first time ever, you could look at a computer-generated world and feel like it could be real. CGI was prevalent at the time, but it was the era of some of the most egregious examples, and they very rarely felt integrated into the human characters and settings. You had completely computer-generated films, but they usually had some sort of cartoon aesthetic. Avatar 2's story was even more of a retread, but the technological jump in the 13 years between films was so impressive that it was similarly transfixing. It becomes an issue, then, that the third film is even more of a retread of the plot of the second film (which was already fundamentally the same as the first film) while not giving us much more beyond what we have come to expect in the imagery. The film is beautiful and impressive, but here Cameron is a victim of his own success; visual media has caught up in a lot of ways. It is a competition between your eyes and your brain, and when your film is so long, the eyes are going to lose sooner or later. On the one end you are amazed how seamlessly the Na'vi stand next to human characters without feeling like Jar Jar Binks or The Scorpion King, but on the other hand you have to roll your eyes when almost every beat is telegraphed a mile away. It is an old joke by now to comment how many people can name a character from the Avatar series, but as the series has grown it has reached a Fast and the Furious-type problem of finding something for all the characters to do. Norm Spellman, an important character in the first film, has little more than a glorified cameo here. Ian Garvin saves Jake Sully in the second act, but then he is never heard or seen again. Where did Wainfleet go? Archetypes do exist for a reason, though. Even though you know Jake is not actually going to kill Spider, it is a little emotional when he calls him dad. Even though you know Lo'Ak is going to mature into being a leader, you still empathize with his struggle at overcoming his feelings of guilt. The interesting one, surprisingly given how paper-thin his character has been, is Quaritch. He was a stock villain in the first film and it felt like a mistake to bring him back in the second film, but here there is something slightly more ambiguous going on. It feels like he is going to have a redemption arc, and while he slightly does, the ending leaves it a little bit open for his grand return in the next film. If the series ended here, it would be fine. It would be hard to imagine Part 4 doing the same thing again, but then again no one would have guessed that the climactic battle would be so similar in 2 and 3 that you could have spliced in scenes from the second film and few people would have known. Judging by the film landscape, Cameron is still the best at the big-budget spectacle, even if it is harder and harder to see what is so important to him about this world that he has dedicated such a huge portion of his life.
damn you adjusted for inflation on my ass yeah. true test is the second weekend. that's when things get crazy. if the falloff is normal than it's over for big box office Jimbo in the states
Pandora came from a dream he had in high school, and then he became the only person alive capable of achieving it visually. I get it, to be honest
Glad we agree with this. I loved the quieter moments with Quaritch and how twice in the film he basically calls off their fight because he's too tired. And he's smart enough to know when to cut his losses, like early on when he freed Sully to help save the kids.
When Carmela tells him he is being confined to the base I thought for sure he would end up flying in to help Jake and company. It is good that we aren't giving cinematic Hitlers their redemption arcs.
I watched the new Avatar film on early Saturday afternoon and the visuals, action scenes.. especially the entire third act and the 3D on the big screen was spectacular... No one does that better than Jim Cameron but the story I didn't mind it and the run time was long but the pacing especially in the middle was a slog but definitely picked up in the third act and Oona Chaplin definitely stole the movie as the villain. My rankings of the Avatar films 1. The Way of Water 2. Avatar (extended cut) 3. Fire & Ash
I kind of agree somewhat with the criticism that she doesn't have a lot to her beyond "crazy pyromaniac" but she was a joy to watch and was suitably unhinged.