Avatar: The Way of the Water has now taken in $2.05 billion at the worldwide box office, Variety reports, passing Avengers: Infinity Wars for the fifth spot on the list of highest-grossing movies of all time and giving director James Cameron three of the top five slots.
Update: Avatar: The Way of the Water has now also passed Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, taking the fourth spot overall. Read the original article below.
The top earning film continues to be Cameron’s own franchise-launching opus, 2009’s Avatar ($2.92 billion), followed by Avengers: Endgame ($2.79 billion), then Cameron again with Titanic ($2.19 billion), that other space opera, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens ($2.07 billion), and now The Way of the Water, which continues to rise.
As it stands, The Way of the Water has a pretty clear path to overtake The Force Awakens for the No. 4 spot, with theaters bereft of new blockbusters until Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania drops February 17th. And the second Avatar may yet sink the Titanic, though Avengers: Endgame looks safe for now — at least, until Avatar 3 floods out the theatrical landscape in December of 2024. Beyond that, Avatar 4 and 5 are set to make a splash in 2026 and 2028. Will they be as big as the first few Avatars? We wouldn’t bet against it. Like death and taxes, James Cameron is one of life’s few certainties.
No doubt Cameron will keep pushing his filmography, even his older movies. In 2022, he commissioned a study to prove that Jack couldn’t have survived in Titanic.
