‘Avatar 2’ remains entrenched at top of the heap

Director James Cameron’s sci- fi sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water” dominated at the box office for a second straight week, drawing $56 million in domestic ticket sales over the Christmas holiday weekend, according to estimates from Comscore released Sunday. The film has grossed an estimated $855 million globally.

“This is James Cameron’s first $ 100 million opener,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore “For this movie to have opened that big and only dropped 58%, it shows it has staying power.”

It’s also clear sailing for the film looking ahead, with more holiday time coming and no comparable competition until February, when Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is released.

Disney has three additional “Avatar” movies on its release schedule through 2028, and Hollywood watchers have been wondering whether the series can make old-school profits after the covid-19 pandemic accelerated the shift of many filmgoers to streaming services, whose business models are currently shaky at best.

The weekend’s runner-up was also a sequel. Universal Pictures’ “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” — a spinoff in the “Shrek” universe by DreamWorks Animation, featuring a swashbuckling cat voiced by Antonio Banderas — brought in an estimated $11.4 million in ticket sales in U.S. and Canadiam theaters.

TriStar Pictures’ bio-pic “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” about the singer’s life, came in third, with a $5.3 million domestic weekend haul, while Paramount’s 1920s flick “Babylon,” starring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, trundled into its opening weekend at No. 4 with $3.5 million.

And “Babylon” was the weekend’s biggest disappointment from “La La Land” director Damian Chazelle, starring Brad Pitt and and Margo Robbie.

The tepid, $ 6.5 million opening weekend in October of director David O. Russell’s “Amsterdam,” another film, set in a similar period, that combined prestige, scope, star power and a celebrated auteur, brought industry worries that audiences just weren’t flocking to theaters for such films.

The concerns proved justified, as “Babylon” barely made more than half of the opening of “Amsterdam.”

The coming weeks in theaters, streaming showings and any nominations it may get could help “Babylon” rise above bomb status.

“I would say ‘Babylon’ is a movie that isn’t about the opening weekend,” Dergarabedian said. “We’ll have to see what it does in the coming weeks then into the new year, particularly if it gets more awards buzz.”

One cinema analyst blamed severe frosty weather across the country for disappointing ticket figures.

“Under normal conditions — without a blizzard, and if Christmas fell just before or after the weekend — we would expect “Puss in Boots 2’s” three-day opening to be around $30 million, a fair-to-solid start,” David A. Gross, who runs the movie consultancy Franchise Entertainment Research, wrote in an analysis. “With schools on holiday, the movie can recover some of its business next week.”

The entertainment business is still struggling to convince movie fans to come back to theaters after pandemic- related closures. Films are appearing on streaming services much faster than they did in the past, as media giants look to bulk up subscriptions to those services. That has conditioned people to wait a few weeks to see new movies at home.

With just two days left in the year, industrywide ticket sales total $7.2 billion, well below the $11.4 billion generated domestically in 2019.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) rides a weird fish with wings in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which remains at No. 1 with $56 million in receipts fro U.S. and Canadian theaters.