Avatar: The Way Of Water has earned $1 billion (£831 million) at the global box office in just 14 days, making it the quickest picture to reach the $1 billion mark in 2014.
Audiences have embraced the long-awaited sequel despite drastically divergent reviews.
It is one of just three films this year to gross over $1 billion, along with Top Gun: Maverick and Jurassic World: Dominion.
However, according to filmmaker James Cameron, his technologically advanced film requires $2 billion to break even.
The film picks up after the events of 2009’s Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time with $2.97 billion (£2.47 billion) in box office receipts.
As cinema attendance continues to decline in the post-pandemic era, analysts predict that the next installment will not surpass the previous one’s gross.
However, based on its current performance, it is projected to surpass Top Gun: Maverick as the most popular film of 2022.
Some reviews lambasted The Way Of Water as a “lumbering, humorless damp squib” of news in which “nothing significant happens” and “the plot is quite silly.”
Others were more enthused, describing the movie as an “eye-popping, jaw-dropping spectacle” and a “completely immersive waking dream.”
The original Avatar was primarily a science-fiction adaptation of Pocahontas, following the story of greedy, colonial people plundering Pandora of its riches.
It was recounted through the eyes of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a human soldier who fell in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a native warrior, and came to see the significance of Pandora’s delicately managed environment.
The sequel is set several years later, with Sully and Neytiri striving to raise a family while protecting their world from another human invasion.
Sequels not fixed in stone
Its box office performance is crucial, as it is the first of four planned sequels, with subsequent installments scheduled for 2024, 2026, and 2028.
Cameron shot the third film concurrently with The Way of Water, as well as “a tiny amount” of the fourth, to ensure that his young performers remained appropriately aged.
“I adore Stranger Things, but they appear to be 27 years old even though they’re meant to be in high school,” he added.
In Avatar 4, the young actors “age six years in the middle of the plot on page 25,” he added. “Therefore, I had to film everything before that point, and then we’ll do everything afterward afterward.”
The director, whose previous works include Terminator, Titanic, and The Abyss, has confessed that his future endeavors would be determined by the profitability of his films.
The market may be telling us we’re done in three months, or we could be semi-done, meaning: ‘Okay, let’s finish the tale in the third film and not continue eternally,'” he told Total Film magazine.
“Even the world has changed since I originally penned these words. It’s a combination of the pandemic and streaming. Or, instead, we may remind them why they should attend the theatre. This film certainly does that.”
The Way Of Water is also the highest-grossing film in the United Kingdom, grossing £25.03 million in its first two weeks of release.
