James Cameron’s latest Avatar film, Avatar: Fire and Ash underperformed at the box office in its opening weekend.
According to The-Numbers, the film grossed $88 million in its opening weekend at the domestic box office. It added another $257 million internationally for a global gross of $345 million.
That opening weekend was way down compared to 2022’s The Way of Water without even factoring in inflation. The Way of Water had an opening weekend of $134.1 million. If you factor in inflation it did $148.5 million in its opening weekend. It went on to gross $688.8 million domestically. With inflation it did $762.8 million.
Without factoring in inflation that’s a decline of 34%. If you factor in inflation it’s a 40% decline.
It did best the original Avatar film without factoring in inflation. That film did $77 million in its opening weekend, but had massive legs and went on to gross $785.2 million. Factoring in inflation, the film grossed around $116.3 million in its opening weekend and $1.1 billion domestically overall.
Without factoring in inflation it’s a 14.2% increase. However, once you factor in inflation it turns into a 24% decline.
On top of underperforming the previous two Avatar films, the film failed to hit box office expectations. Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro shared that the film was expected to do $110 million with a range between $100 million and $130 million. $88 million is far below that. In fact, it missed the mark by 20%.
Shawn Robbins at Box Office Theory predicted the film would do $93.2 million with a range between $85 and $105 million. He was still off by nearly 6%.
At Variety Rebecca Rubin projected the film to gross between $90 million and $105 million.
These underperform-overperform estimates are nonsense, just giving the press something to write about. All the studio executives care about are profits. With an estimated $346 million global take on opening weekend and the big late December holidays ahead, Avatar 3 will easily break the billion dollar mark.
But the press usually ignores two important details. First, 3/4 of the sales are overseas - where the studio gets much less of the swag than from domestic sales.
Second, the costs of this Avatar are insane: production cost of $350-400 million, perhaps another $150m for marketing. It needs over a billion to break even. Much more if most of the sales continue to be overseas.
This is Hollywood’s last chance to have a profit blockbuster in this horrible year. I hope for their failure. Only that could dent the walls of this great Leftist fortress.