Avatar: The Way Of Water opens big domestically, but it hasn’t started breaking records yet

As we wisely predicted last week (nobody else could’ve seen this coming!), James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way Of Water made a real splash at the U.S. box office this weekend, making nearly $130 million more than its closest competition. That’s one of the highest openings of the year, but it is not the highest (it still fell short of Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Jurassic World: Dominion, Thor: Love And Thunder, and—if only by a couple of bucks—The Batman).

That being said, nobody’s going to turn their nose up at $134 million, which is what the long-awaited Avatar sequel made, even if it’s going to need to make a lot more than that to justify the price tag and the amount of sequels Cameron has in mind. Of course, the first Avatar famously had a long and very profitable box office run, and there’s not much else coming out for a while that could threaten The Way Of Water, so there’s no need for Cameron to start selling off his collection of prized submarines or whatever just yet.

The rest of the top 10 isn’t very exciting, because it consists almost entirely of movies that have already been around for at least a couple of weeks, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Avatar movies tend to dominate the cultural conversation, with everyone talking about their favorite specific characters and quotes all the time, so it’s okay to have something else on the menu. Speaking of, The Menu made $1.7 million in its fifth week on the charts, sitting at $32 million total. Actually, only the top five made over a million dollars, with Violent Night making $5.6 million ($34 after three weeks), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever making $5.4 million ($418 million after six weeks, most of which it spent in the top spot), and Strange World making $2.2 million ($33 million after four weeks).

The only newbie in the top 10 who wasn’t there before is Empire Of Light, which expanded its rollout by (relatively) a lot this weekend and jumped from 21st to 10th. Speaking of films with a smaller release, The Whale continues to do (relatively) big money with its very limited rollout, making $169,000 off of six screens. With all of the pro-Brendan Fraser buzz, that thing is going to do well when it finally expands. Again: relatively. There aren’t any avatars in it.

The full top 10 list from Box Office Mojo is below.

• Avatar: The Way Of Water
• Violent Night
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Strange World
• The Menu
• Devotion
• The Fabelmans
• Black Adam
• I Heard The Bells
• Empire Of Light