‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ keeps drenching the box office competition

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 weekend’s runner-up was also an animated 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 the U.S. and Canada.

TriStar Pictures’ “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 with $3.5 million.

One cinema analyst blamed severe frosty weather across the U.S. 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 $30m, 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.�

A lot is riding on the performance of the Walt Disney Co.’s hefty and expensive “Avatar� sequel, which reportedly cost hundreds of millions of dollars just to film and which has a run time of more than three hours.

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.

Including this weekend, “Avatar: The Way of Water� has grossed an estimated $855 million globally, according to Comscore. Director Cameron has suggested that the movie needs to ultimately crack $2 billion to be considered a success.