Avatar: The Way of Water took its fourth weekend box office with $45 million in domestic ticket sales, but faced stiff competition as M3GAN debuted with a strong $30.2 million in North America.
As reported by Variety , Universal and Blumhouse Productions’ horror puppet thriller M3GAN brought in another $14.8 million internationally to help push its global total to $45 million.
M3GAN was projected to earn around $17-20 million in North America, but there was a lot of positive buzz surrounding the film, which had a budget of only $12 million. It clearly surpassed those projections and even became the first film to open over $30 million in the first week of the new year since 2012’s Devil Inside opened to $33.7 million.
In our review of M3GAN, we said, “M3GAN can prove to be more than just a horror villain meme, though the film does struggle to balance horror and comedy at times.”
Despite its impressive performance, M3GAN didn’t have enough to dethrone the behemoth that is Avatar: The Way of Water. Its $45 million at the weekend box office is only a 35% drop from last weekend, and it continues to climb the list of the biggest movies of all time.
As it stands, Avatar: The Way of Water has earned more than $516 million in North America and $1.1 billion overseas. Its global gross is $1.707 billion, which is enough to earn it the honor of becoming the seventh-highest-grossing film of all time.
According to Box Office Mojo, it surpassed Jurassic World’s $1.671 billion worldwide and is now behind Spider-Man: No Way Home with $1.916 billion. The original Avatar is the winner of this list with a worldwide gross of $2.922 billion.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish took third place with $12.4 million, bringing its North American total to $87 million. Tom Hanks’ A Man Called Otto had a limited release but still took fourth place with $4.2 million. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever rounds out the top five with $3.3 million. Domestically, the latest MCU film earned $445 million.
The biggest movies coming in 2023
2023 is just beginning, and you can check out 60 movies we can’t wait to see this year, including Ant-Man: Quantumania, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, John Wick 4, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and more.
Do you have any advice for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please email newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Add Comment