hw64

That's a Box Office Mojo estimate based on yearly average ticket prices. It's not accurate for blockbuster films like Black Panther which make a sizeable chunk of their revenue from expensive premium format tickets. BOM will likely have No Way Home at around 80m tickets sold by the same metric, which, again, won't be accurate. Edit: it's also worth noting that the overall yearly average ticket price (which is measured across all releases) is skewed by films with younger audiences who have cheaper ticket prices, so a blockbuster film is going to have a higher ticket price than the average anyway even without premium format tickets — premium formats just exacerbate the effect and bring the average ticket price for a blockbuster even higher.

Titanic's initial theatrical run is probably the single biggest box office run of all time. A NWH-like performance comes around every couple of years; Titanic's run is a literal once-in-a-lifetime.

😆

No.

Exactly a year to go today!

Barely more than a year away now. And 1,000 pages, damn. There's a lot of history in this thread.

I don't think China will allow a foreign film to become the highest-grossing film in China again. A domestic film has held that title from mid-2017 onwards — nearly 5 years now — and given that the title is now held, at least in dollar gross, by The Battle at Lake Changjin, it seems especially unlikely that they'll want to relinquish the title, given the content of that film. All that to say: while Avatar 2 might have the potential to be the highest-grossing film of all time in China without any outside meddling, The Battle at Lake Changjin's ~$900m is likely to serve as an upper limit for Avatar 2's potential — that is, unless another Chinese movie increases upon the record before Avatar 2's release.

The "GA" has absolutely no interest in release schedules, and has not been paying attention to Avatar 2's release date changes over the past 5 or 6 years. In fact, the GA probably doesn't even know an Avatar 2 is coming out yet, and won't know until the marketing starts. The people who religiously keep up with movie news — the types that post about movies on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube etc. — are not the GA by any stretch.

We are now closer than we've ever been to the release of Avatar 2. Just over 500 days to go!

We're better than this, surely.

It's less than 18 months away (again), I believe we're off the Lot. Edit: Thread's been moved, thanks mods.

Just to update: Fellowship has actually jumped up to 20k showings on Saturday now, so more in the ballpark of the other rereleases, although still quite a bit smaller.

Seems to be very small-scale. Currently has about 5k showings on Saturday, and will probably end up at around 6k in total. The Harry Potter and Avatar re-releases both had about 60k showings on their first Saturdays, for comparison. There's obviously more competition at the moment with Detective Conan opening this weekend, Sister and all last week's local openers still playing, GvK, etc., but even so. I don't think the re-releases are only going to be playing for a week, though—where are you getting that from? Presales for the second/third/fourth weeks will only show up later in the run.

Won't hit $60m. Heading for a total of just over $56m—think it's at about $54.5m currently, through Sunday.

¥22.6m ($3.5m) for the weekend. Passed $50m on Saturday as expected—current total $51.7m.

GvK's gross on Maoyan has been stuck at 13,647.85万 for roughly the past half an hour.

Most likely, yep, somewhere in that range.

Weekend ended up at around $14.1m, down 33% from opening weekend. Total currently $44m, will pass $50m next Friday or Saturday.

Avatar's doing really well today, better than I expected—seems to play especially well at the weekend. Currently at ¥38.5m for Saturday at 9pm local time, and should hit ¥40m by the end of the day. Sunday presales are at ¥4m right now and should end up at around ¥5m by 12am, compared to Saturday's ¥7m. The Sunday drop won't be as good as last week's non-drop but it should still be pretty decent. Total weekend should be around $13.5-$14.2m, a great result.

Didn't quite reach ¥19m or ¥20m in the end, ended up at around ¥18.8m ($2.9m) for today. I was probably a bit overzealous with the ¥20m, but it slowed down quicker than I expected for a Friday and the gross also froze for around 30 minutes. Still, presales for Saturday are good at just over ¥7m currently, and it should be a good weekend for Avatar.

Think ¥20m is likely today. With that kind of a Friday, we could see the weekend hitting $13-$14m.

Monday: ¥18.05m ($2.78m) Tuesday: ¥15.37m ($2.36m) Wednesday: ¥13.00m ($2.00m) Thursday: should be around ¥12m ($1.85m) I agree with others here that this weekend should be $10m+, maybe around $11-$12m.

The major payoff has already happened, but nevertheless it'll be interesting to follow the rest of this run. It's still early on Sunday, but for what it's worth, Avatar is currently pacing on par with Saturday, if not slightly ahead. Given that it's a Sunday, I expect that the evenings will be weaker and it won't quite match Saturday's gross, but in any case it seems like the very positive WOM is really starting to buoy the film after a small opening day (which was to be expected really, given the circumstances of release). It'll really be a testament to Avatar's enduring ability to make an impact on audiences as a cinematic experience if the film can carry itself to a decent gross here, given the extremely last-minute nature of the release. Would bode very well for a potential future global re-release (a proper one, with proper marketing and actual advanced notice) and, of course, for Avatar 2.

Great post. While I don't believe (and I highly doubt you do either) that the global market is untapped to the extent that it was when Jurassic Park was the highest-grossing film of all time—not even a Titanic-sized hit could double today's $2.8b record and make $5.6b—the comparison is definitely a very apt one in terms of how Endgame didn't fully realize the potential of the 2019 global market to the extent that Avatar, and especially Titanic, did in their respective years. It's clear to me that, in comparison to Avatar and Titanic which both maxed or near-maxed out the potential of almost every market to the extent that a global Hollywood blockbuster can, Endgame fell short of that in a number of markets. In Europe, for example, Endgame was often only top 3 or top 5 for the year, while Titanic and Avatar, a decade or two on from their releases, still remain the biggest or near-biggest ticket sellers in comparison to all movies released since 1997 and 2009 respectively. InsideKino has great comparison pages comparing Titanic, Avatar and Endgame's ticket sales in over 30 overseas markets to the movies that have been released since their respective release dates. The comparison is stark: over two decades on from its release, Titanic (see here) still remains the biggest ticket seller from December 1997 onwards in most European markets. Avatar is similar: over a decade on from its release, Avatar (see here) is still the biggest ticket seller from December 2009 onwards in a lot of European markets, and where it's been beaten, it's often only by a huge local hit. For Endgame (see here) , there's been less than a year of proper releases since its own release in April 2019, but it's only the admissions leader (from April 2019 onwards) in 3 European countries, often being beaten by lower-tier blockbusters like the Lion King, Frozen 2, and even Joker. The same can be said of Japan—Marvel, and superhero movies in general, have always been relatively weak in Europe and Japan, and while Endgame did better in these markets than almost all, if not all other superhero movies, the weakness still shows. Outside of the US, Endgame's real strength was in the emerging markets—in places like India, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia—where it really did max out the market potential (it also did extremely well in South Korea and China, although I wouldn't say it maxed out the potential of either). All of those markets have obviously expanded significantly since 2009, but Avatar was similarly successful in most of those markets for its time (and significantly more so, in my opinion, in South Korea and China), often being the biggest or at worst second-biggest ticket seller of all time at the end of its run. As you say, this isn't to take anything away from Endgame, which for sure has the second best box office run since Titanic, but I agree that an Avatar-sized run would be breezing past Avatar's $2.8b in the 2019 box office market with quite some ease.

The exchange rate issue is absolutely a factor, but the impact of exchange rates is dwarfed massively by the impact of box office market growth—especially with China in the last decade—which heavily favours more recent films. Almost everyone's aware that China has expanded by a factor of roughly 800-850% in admissions since 2009, but outside of the US, Europe, Japan and Australia (the established markets), almost every single box office market has seen significant growth in the last decade, including: Russia (roughly +60% in admissions from 2009 to 2019); South Korea (roughly +45% in admissions from 2009 to 2019); Mexico (+90% from 2009 to 2017); Brazil (+60% from 2009 to 2017); and Colombia (+125% from 2009 to 2017), to name just a few. As pointed out above, it's convenient that this huge factor is glossed over or simply ignored or not mentioned when Avatar's gross is discussed, in stark contrast to the exchange rates issue which is often brought up at the first opportunity in order to qualify Avatar's success. You'd expect people on here of all places to consider all factors that affect a movie's gross, but all too often the factors are picked and chosen in order to fit the narrative that someone wants to create (sometimes to hilarious results - Endgame on par with Titanic, anyone?)