James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water began its international box office rollout today in such majors as Korea, France, Germany and Italy — and with early sneaks in China. One of the most anticipated movies of recent years, it’s dominating play.
Some individual market grosses for opening day will come tomorrow, but for now we can report that Korea opened to $3.24M including midnights and with an 85% market share. This is lower than comps like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Avengers: Infinity War which also debuted on a Wednesday. However, as we have previously noted, the three-hour-plus runtime makes this appointment viewing for some — today was a workday in the market. The Naver score is 9.48 which is above both of the comps cited above.
In China, The Way of Water had been planned for 3,000 showings at 7pm local today, but ended up doing just 1,688 screenings per our information. This is a result of the ongoing Covid issues in the market where 73% of cinemas are open and there is a confidence issue amid the about-face from the government on the zero-Covid policy. The resultant sneaks, before official opening on Friday, were worth RMB 20M ($2.9M). We wrote yesterday that $100M was possible in China this opening weekend; we are now taking a more cautious stance, even if hope springs. Douban and Maoyan critical and social scores have not yet posted.
Elsewhere, The Way of Water was tops in its afternoon showings in France today, notching 79,000 admissions from 1,210 screens for $728K. Notably, numbers were good for dubbed versions which indicates family play. France has a mega distraction today in that we are playing Morocco in the World Cup semi-final this evening and that’s likely to impact, as we wrote yesterday, the later showings. (Anecdotally, in the parking lot of my local giant supermarket four hours before the match, it was impossible to find a spot as the whole of my area descended to stock up for the semis.)
In other parts of Asia, we hear that early indications are encouraging from Philippines and Thailand.
There is much more to come on this Disney/20th Century Studios sequel which notably adds Australia, Brazil and Mexico on Thursday ahead of the UK, Spain, and Japan on Friday — we’ll be following through the weekend.