image copyright 20th Century Studios
“Avatar: Waterway” grossed $1 billion at the global box office in just 14 days, becoming the fastest-growing movie this year.
The film won great acclaim from audiences, despite widely mixed reviews.
The film was one of three films whose value exceeded $ 1 billion this year, after “The Ultimate Weapon: Maverick” (Top Gun: Maverick) and “Jurassic World: Dominion”.
However, director James Cameron said his technically innovative film needs to reach $2 billion to turn a profit.
The new movie picks up where the events of Avatar left off in 2009, and is the highest-grossing movie of all time, with box office revenues of $2.97 billion.
Analysts say that the new part is unlikely to reach this number, as attendance at cinemas is still low after the Corona epidemic.
Based on current performance, the movie is likely to overtake “The Ultimate Weapon: Maverick” as the highest grossing movie of 2022.
This news may come as a surprise to critics, some of whom have criticized “Water Road” as “disappointing and humorless”, with “nothing meaningful happening” and “the story is really very stupid”.
Others were more enthusiastic, calling the film “an amazing show”.
The first part of Avatar was a sci-fi version that follows the story of greedy humans and colonizers who strip the resources of a distant planet called Pandora.
It is told by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a human soldier who falls in love with an indigenous warrior named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and realizes the importance of Pandora’s delicately balanced ecosystem.
The events of the new part take place several years later, as Sully and Neytiri head underwater to protect their planet from another human invasion while trying to raise a family.
There is a lot of importance to the film’s performance at the box office, as it is the first of four scheduled parts, with the next films to be shown in 2024, 2026 and 2028.
Cameron shot the third film alongside Waterway, as well as a “little bit” of the fourth film to ensure the child actors still looked the right age.
He explained that the child actors in the fourth installment of Avatar “grow up six years in the middle of the story… so I needed [لتصوير] Everything before that, and everything after that, we’ll do later.”
The director, whose other credits include “Terminator,” “Titanic” and “The Abyss,” admitted her plans were dictated by the profitability of the films.
“The market can tell us we’re done in three months, or we’re close to it,” he told Total Film magazine. “In the sense of: OK, let’s finish the story in the third movie, and not go on indefinitely if the movies aren’t profitable.”
“We’re in a different world now than we were even when I wrote this stuff. It’s the double whammy — the pandemic and the streaming platforms.”