‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Will Likely “Break Even” in the Coming Days

Variety is reporting that James Cameron’s mega-expensive return to Pandora not only made $86.3 million over the four-day weekend, but that the film is set to “break even” in a matter of days.

Its domestic total on Monday morning stood at a little over $444 million. By tonight, “Avatar: The Way of Water” will overtake “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” as the second highest-grossing domestic release of 2022 with around $445 million. “Top Gun: Maverick” is still the top domestic ticket seller with $718.7 million.

However, ‘The Way of Water’ will, in a matter of days, surpass Maverick’s $1.48 billion worldwide mark.

Before the release of “Avatar: The Way of Water,” Cameron had made the comments that ‘The Way of Water’ needed to hit $2 billion to become profitable during its theatrical run. Well, it would appear that he was slightly overestimating the numbers. ‘The Way of Water’ will only need $1.5 billion worldwide to break even and begin to profit while in theaters. The sequel is already at $1.4 billion worldwide.

Cameron’s $2 billion-to-break-even comments never really made sense to me. The film’s budget is said to be around $450 million and, as a general rule, a film starts to make profit after its made 2.5x its budget. Of course, it’s always dependent on a case-by-case basis, but $1.5 billion is almost 3x the budget of Cameron’s sequel.