Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter There are plenty of valid reasons to be skeptical about “Avatar: The Way of Water.” It’s been more than a decade since James Cameron’s otherworldly sci-fi epic “Avatar” opened in theaters in 2009, smashing expectations on its way to becoming the biggest movie in history with $2.85 billion in global ticket sales.
But times, tastes and box office expectations have changed drastically since moviegoers first made contact with the Na’vi. In the ensuing years, theater owners have developed a greater reliance on big-budget comic book spectacles, and 3D technology (despite Cameron’s best efforts) failed to take off in the way the filmmaker had hoped.
Especially since the pandemic, billion-dollar hits outside of the superhero space have been few and far between. “After 13 years, we’re in a different world now, where superheroes dominate the fantasy action space,” says David A.
Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. But Cameron, the filmmaker behind behemoths like “Titanic” and “The Terminator,” has never missed at the box office, so even cynics believe that it’s probably unwise to bet against the multi-billion-dollar earning director.
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