Weekend predictions: Avatar headed for the top again

January 6, 2023

Avatar: The Way of Water

Avatar: The Way of Water will top the box office chart again this weekend, as its seemingly unstoppable run continues into the New Year. The big question is when it will start losing momentum, and this weekend is the first big test it has faced, partly because M3GAN is looking to get 2023 off to a good start. Here are our model’s predictions going into the weekend…

First up, here’s how Way of Water stacks up compared to the films in our database that have performed most similarly (click on the image for a full interactive chart):

Way of Water is tracking most closely on a day-to-day basis with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which had $455.3 million in the bank at this point in its run and went on to earn $533.5 million domestically. But that film was starting to slow down by the first weekend in January, with $3.9 million on its third Thursday compared to Way of Water’s $6.8 million. Incidentally, that number for the new Avatar is 4th-best 3rd Thursday of all time for a movie, and the three films ahead of it on that list benefited from holidays (either around Christmas or July 4).

Way of Water is gaining about 4% a day compared to Rogue One, and if it manages to continue that trend, it’ll post $37.3 million this weekend. That’s our official prediction, but there are reasons to think it could do better.

Specifically, Way of Water has been tracking consistently about 20%–25% ahead of the original Avatar over the past couple of weeks. If that trend holds, it should do 20%–25% more than Avatar’s $50.3-million fourth weekend. A slightly more precise calculation using a linear regression between the two films’ cumulative totals by day gives a predicted fourth weekend for Avatar: The Way of Water of $58.55 million.

That range, $37.3 million to $58.6 million, is quite wide, and highlights the remaining uncertainty of the eventual box office performance of Way of Water. If it performs like a relatively “normal” film, it’ll fall a bit short of $40 million. If it truly has that Cameron magic, it’ll top $50 million. I wouldn’t bet either way at this point, but we’ll have a much better picture on Saturday morning when we have Friday’s estimates.

This week’s new wide release, M3GAN is a Blumhouse production being released by Universal, which gives us a wealth of comps to compare against:

A weekend in the high teens looked the best bet heading into the New Year, but excellent reviews have helped it gain some buzz in the past few days, and its preview numbers look very healthy:

As always, our model uses a weighted average of previews and the fundamentals prediction to produce a final number. A weekend in the high twenties would be an excellent result for a horror movie not based on previous IP. 2020’s The Invisible Man and 2017’s Happy Death Day are good comparisons.

Finally, expanding wide this week is A Man Called Otto, starring Tom Hanks. This wasn’t expected to be a huge hit, but our model doesn’t think much of its chances based on its performance on opening weekend and the results for recent wide expansions:

I feel like our prediction might be a little low on this one, but the film looks likely to end up in the lower reaches of the top 10 at best, and possibly miss the top 10 entirely.

Here’s what our model thinks the top 10 as a whole will look like.

We’ll obviously be down from last weekend, but if Way of Water and M3GAN have the kind of weekends that look likely at this point we should easily top the $62.6 million earned by all films this weekend last year.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, M3GAN, A Man Called Otto, Tom Hanks, James Cameron