After more than ten years of production, “Avatar 2: The Way Of The Water” is unsurprisingly one of the most expensive movies of all time. James Cameron then even described its sequel as “the worst deal in the history of cinema”.
How much is Avatar 2: The Water Path? James Cameron’s answer in an interview with the US magazine GQ: “Fucking expensive!‘ (“Damn expensive!”) It is still unknown exactly how much exactly the long-awaited sequel cost. But James Cameron has now revealed in the same interview how much the film would have to gross in order not to become a bad deal for him and Disney: “It’s the worst deal in the history of cinema. It should be the third or fourth highest grossing film of all time. This is the breakeven point.”
Sounds like a gigantic task – but how many dollars of global box office sales does that mean exactly? Here are the current 10 highest-grossing movies of all time (unadjusted for inflation) that Cameron alluded to in his interview statement:
- 10th place: “Fast & Furious 7” = $1.515 billion
- 9th place: Marvel’s “The Avengers” = $1.518 billion
- 8th place: “The Lion King” (Remake) = $1.663 billion
- 7th place: “Jurassic World” = $1.671 billion
- 6th place: “Spider-Man: No Way Home” = $1.971 billion
- 5th place: “Avengers 3: Infinity War” = $2.048 billion
- 4th place: “Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens” = $2.069 billion
- 3rd place: “Titanic” = $2.201 billion
- 2nd place: “Avengers 4: Endgame” = $2.797 billion
- 1st place: “Avatar” = $2.922 billion
According to James Cameron, “Avatar 2: The Way Of The Water” would need to gross more than two billion (2,000,000,000!) dollars at the worldwide box office to reach profitability. Now you could say that it is almost a third less than the registered predecessor “Avatar: Aufbruch nach Pandora” – and in fact you would even expect a sequel to surpass it.
But “Avatar: Aufbruch nach Pandora” is also an absolute exception, whose outstanding box office result has a lot to do with the film’s role as a revolutionary 3D pioneer at the time (at that time 3D cinema was only on the rise , but for some years it has been losing increasingly important ground).
‘Avatar 2’ makes 100 million more than ‘Avatar’ at the start – this is really behind the sensational predictions
So the pressure is huge again – and in fact, nobody really believes that this calculation can actually work in the end (assuming James Cameron wasn’t exaggerating).
But wait a minute, doesn’t that sound familiar? Even before the immensely expensive mega-productions ‘Titanic’ and ‘Avatar’ hit theaters, a large part of the film industry thought that James Cameron had indeed ruined his career with an overpriced crazy project. But as we now know, things turned out differently – and either way the result became the most successful film of all time up to that point…
If ‘Avatar’ fails, James Cameron has a plan B: that’s why he sees Netflix as a threat to his franchise
