Saturday update: Avatar tracking towards $40-million-plus fourth weekend

January 7, 2023

In yesterday’s weekend prediction column, I asked whether Avatar: The Way of Water will perform like a “normal” movie or a “Cameron movie” on its fourth weekend. This morning, we got the answer. With Disney estimating $11.406 million in receipts on Friday, Way of Water continues to trend better than movies usually do, but is beginning to look more like a regular film. It should top $40 million this weekend, which is excellent by any standards, but a little more back in the world of the mortals. Here’s my analysis this morning…

In the table below, I’ve compared the predicted results for the film from our “Rogue One model”, which assumes Way of Water will continue to perform similarly to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which was conveniently released on exactly the same day of the year back in 2016, and our “Avatar model”, which compares the new Avatar to the original.

The actual 4th Friday for Way of Water falls somewhere between the two, but slightly closer to the Rogue One model—it’s $1.4 million ahead of that prediction, compared to $2.3 million behind the Avatar model. Projecting that forwards for the remainder of the weekend produces a revised prediction of $42.5 million. That’s not a huge distance from our Friday prediction, but beating that number by $5 million this weekend is more excellent news for Disney.

M3GAN, meanwhile, is performing almost exactly in line with our Friday prediction. Universal is projecting an opening weekend of $27.45 million this morning, within a rounding error of our model’s prediction.

The brightest spot this weekend might be A Man Called Otto, which earned $1.55 million on Friday and should post something around $4 million for the weekend. That’s not exactly huge for a Tom Hanks movie, but well ahead of what we expected yesterday.

- Friday estimates
- Avatar: The Way of Water interactive comparisons

Bruce Nash

Filed under: Tom Hanks