Disney and Avatar 2

[James Wyrembelski]

I'm not overly excited for the 4 week commitment and glad we're not 3D capable.

Curious to know what others think on what Avatar 2 will do at the box office. I hear it will be "to the moon" and others say it'll do just fine but nothing exceptional. Wakanda has done well box office wise but not here. Ticket to Paradise turned out to be the winner in the drought by large margins. Fascinating to see how every location is unique in the crowds it can draw.

[Mike Blakesley]

4 weeks? That means they're expecting Star Wars numbers out of this. I suppose they are considering the wild popularity of the Avatar-land in the Animal Kingdom theme park as a factor, but I don't know. Our booker thinks they will "knock it out of the park" with Avatar 2, but he thought that about Black Panther and that didn't happen here, so who knows.

I'm not overly excited for the 4 week commitment and glad we're not 3D capable.

I hate a 4-week deal, but at the same time there's not much else to play since everybody is giving Avatar all the breathing room.

I have noticed that the "final" one-sheet makes no mention of 3-D, which I thought was kind of odd, considering the last Avatar was really the monster driver behind the last 3-D boom. Does their letter specify how many 3-D shows you would have to have if you were 3-D capable? (As you can tell, I've seen no such letter.)

[Mike Blakesley]

Our booker sent out a memo from Disney which may be the letter discussed above, but it contains a notation that Avatar2 "is primarily a 3-D release and will be marketed as such. 2-D bookings will need to be discussed with and approved by the Disney sales department."

And yes, it's a 4-week minimum.

I'm sure they'll allow 2-D playtimes at some point in the run, but ugh.

[Mark Lane]

I'm not overly excited for the 4 week commitment and glad we're not 3D capable.

Curious to know what others think on what Avatar 2 will do at the box office. I hear it will be "to the moon" and others say it'll do just fine but nothing exceptional. Wakanda has done well box office wise but not here. Ticket to Paradise turned out to be the winner in the drought by large margins. Fascinating to see how every location is unique in the crowds it can draw.

James, we are also located in Michigan and are experiencing the same thing.
Ticket to Paradise in it's third week, did better for us than Black Adam did in it's first and second week combined. Black Panther Wakanda Forever is not doing well for us. Our Disney rep released us from our three week agreement so we can show Strange Planet (replacing one Disney movie for another Disney movie). We had a few people walk out of the Wakanda on Saturday afternoon. I have been keeping an eye NCG's and Celebration's on the on-line sales of Wakanda Forever and they are not doing any better than we are.

We will not be showing Avatar on the break.. we are opting for Puss in Boots.

[James Wyrembelski]

Mark,

TTP did the exact same thing here. Better than 2 weeks of Black Adam and both films have widely out performed Wakanda.

I think the days of the Marvel draw are over for us. Luckily these smaller mid level films really bring out the older crowds. Hopefully we get a decent stream of them in the coming months. This is the downside of having open grosses, when you see yourself in the last spot by a significant degree . Then again, it shows the writing is on the wall for these types of films here.

I'll have to ask others that are not on this forum if they've heard anything about the 3D requirements.

[Lyle Romer]

"Thousands" of years? I'd say more like 127 years, but point taken.

The shadow puppet performing cavemen would demand a 3 week exclusive in the biggest cave. Don't you know your cinema history? :-)

[Mike Blakesley]

TTP did the exact same thing here.

Here, too. It brought it a lot of the same crowd that came to Top Gun Maverick. We'd have been better off to keep it a second week and skip Black Panther.

We're going to open Strange World next Wednesday too, I'm just hoping the "controversial content" that I've heard vague references to isn't too controversial.

[Eric Thuemmel]

TTP did the exact same thing here. Better than 2 weeks of Black Adam and both films have widely out performed Wakanda.

I think the days of the Marvel draw are over for us. Luckily these smaller mid level films really bring out the older crowds. Hopefully we get a decent stream of them in the coming months. This is the downside of having open grosses, when you see yourself in the last spot by a significant degree . Then again, it shows the writing is on the wall for these types of films here.

I'll have to ask others that are not on this forum if they've heard anything about the 3D requirements.

Hey fellow Michiganders, we took TTP on the 3rd weekend of wide release and it's done great, the mid-weeks this week (our 2nd week, 4th week of wide release) are out-performing WAKANDA FOREVER.

Disney wants AVATAR 4 weeks of 3D only on your biggest screen is what I was told. If you want to show it 2D, you have to show it on a 2nd screen. With a 3hr 10min runtime, you'll have a hard time getting 3 shows in during a day. Not sure how we'll play it, but if we were a one-screen we definitely would wait until January.

[Bobby Henderson]

Wakanda Forever is apparently really popular here. I took my girlfriend to the movies Friday night; it was her birthday so I let her pick the show and keep my mouth shut about the choice. She wanted to see Black Adam. The movie was a little better than I expected. Anyway, the 13-plex theater parking lot was filled with cars. Basically the Wakanda Forever shows were pretty much selling out even for it being the second weekend. I imagine the movie may be packing in the crowds on Thanksgiving weekend too.

I was wondering when an actual Shazam sequel would be released. Black Adam is sort of a sidebar picture. Anyway they showed a trailer for the next Shazam movie on the front of Black Adam.

I'm still not sure what to think about Avatar 2 (and Avatar 3). 13 years is a long time between installments. The trailer makes it look like they're taking the big time gap into account with the storyline. I remember thinking the first Avatar movie could end up being a big flop (it wasn't). A lot of movie industry people expected Titanic to be an enormous flop (it wasn't). James Cameron has a pretty good track record, just not a long list of movies in his filmography. In the past 25 years he has directed 3 only feature films. Yeah, Titanic was released almost 25 years ago.

I'm still scratching my head in confusion over why there are still no Blu-ray discs of The Abyss or True Lies. One might think the House of the Mouse would do something about that to build a James Cameron-related promotional push in advance of these Avatar sequels. Are they just waiting out the clock for when physical media formats like Blu-ray finally die and people are only able to watch movies via streaming? Even in that case the "HD" masters for True Lies and The Abyss currently shown to the public pretty much suck.

[Mike Blakesley]

With a 3hr 10min runtime, you'll have a hard time getting 3 shows in during a day.

How so? You could do 12 noon, 4:00, and 8:00; or 12:45, 4:30 and 8:15. You could even do 11:30 pm with that first schedule, if crowds warranted.

[Eric Thuemmel]

How so? You could do 12 noon, 4:00, and 8:00; or 12:45, 4:30 and 8:15. You could even do 11:30 pm with that first schedule, if crowds warranted.

Oh I'm sure we'll do 3 shows daily during the weekends. But depending on your normal hours of operation, if you normally do 1,4,7 on a weekday and now you're running 12,4, and 8, you're opening an hour earlier and closing down 2 hours later. So for a weekday is it worth being open and having staff work for 3 extra hours to get in a 3rd show, when that missing mid-day matinee is going to bring in how many extra people? I'm not expecting Star Wars number where we could run a late night show and still get a good turnout. Good thing it's mostly showing over the holidays, that week between Christmas and New Year every day is like a Saturday.

[Mike Blakesley]

Usually there is a clear-cut decision on what option to take but this time I'm kind of flummoxed.

- 4 week playtime, so we'd get 2 or 2 1/2 good weeks and then about 10 days of crickets.
- It has to be either 100% 3-D or 100% 2-D, which to me is stupidity at its finest. Hey folks, Disney is forcing us to dis-satisfy about half of our patrons! They're the happiest studio on earth!
- There are no real great alternatives to fill the four weeks, but there are some acceptable ones.
- Even if we wait, they're still gonna want 100% shows in one format or the other, and they'll probably make us wait 6 or more weeks to get a print.
- Our competition down the road will be opening it on the break since they have 3 screens, but they don't have 3-D so that makes it tempting for us to run the 3-D version.
- We've had a lot of interest in the movie already, even though it's still almost a month out.
- There is always the chance that this thing could have a $175 million opening weekend and then fall off the ledge.

Part of me wants to go ahead and play it in 3-D and just hope that they will relent and allow 2-D showings if we beg hard enough but then this IS Disney, and it IS James Cameron, so.....

?????

[Frank Cox]

https://gizmodo.com/avatar-2-way-of-...ice-1849812098

Here’s something you probably don’t want to hear if you’re a high-powered movie executive for Avatar producer 20th Century or their new corporate overlords at Disney: director James Cameron to calling his own sequel, The Way of Water, “the worst business case in movie history.” But that’s apparently what he did!

According to a report by Variety, Cameron said the long-in-development (and possibly long-anticipated?) Avatar sequel needs “to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history. That’s your threshold. That’s your break even.” That would mean The Way of Water needs to earn somewhere between Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ $2.07 billion box office and Cameron’s own Titanic, which currently sits at $2.2 billion.

The good news for those execs is that the first Avatar movie is the all-time, worldwide box office champ with an astonishing $2.9 billion to its name, so The Way of Water cracking the $2 billion mark is by no means impossible. The bad news is that planning on a movie making $2+ billion seems like the height of hubris, which is very much on brand for Cameron but surely makes those execs sit up bolt-upright in the middle of the night, screaming at the nightmare of all those dollar signs getting flushed down the toilet.

Avatar is so weird in that it was—is—the highest-grossing movie of all time, but left almost no pop culture imprint like the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. Does that mean people got their fill of blue cat people back in 2009, or have they been quietly slavering for more? We’ll see when The Way of Water finally comes into existence on December 16, but rest assured even if it bombs, Cameron seems deadset on making Avatar 3.

[Mark Lane]

Usually there is a clear-cut decision on what option to take but this time I'm kind of flummoxed.

- 4 week playtime, so we'd get 2 or 2 1/2 good weeks and then about 10 days of crickets.

Part of me wants to go ahead and play it in 3-D and just hope that they will relent and allow 2-D showings if we beg hard enough but then this IS Disney, and it IS James Cameron, so.....

?????

We expect to pass on Avatar 2. Four weeks is a deal breaker for us. We did not do that well with Star Wars. Our numbers are down with Black Adam and Black Panther so I have doubts with Avatar.
We a single screen so it is a little easier for us to find content to fill the one screen. We are opening Puss in Boots and likely will open Man Call Otto. I can fill a week here and there with The Chosen, Marcill the Shell, or other movies from smaller studios. There are not a lot of options and even fewer good options, but four weeks of a movie I don't have much faith in, is not an option to us.

[Bobby Henderson]

Avatar is so weird in that it was—is—the highest-grossing movie of all time, but left almost no pop culture imprint like the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. Does that mean people got their fill of blue cat people back in 2009, or have they been quietly slavering for more? We’ll see when The Way of Water finally comes into existence on December 16, but rest assured even if it bombs, Cameron seems deadset on making Avatar 3.

According to James Cameron's filmography at IMDb.com all of the principal photography for Avatar 3 is already "in the can." That installment is in post-production with a planned 2024 release date. Some scenes are already being shot for Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 even though those two movies aren't set for release until 2026 and 2028. I suppose all the extra time is needed for rendering the CG imagery and doing other post production work.

Oh, apparently there is going to be a True Lies TV series, coming in 2023. Does that mean we should have at least some fucking hope at all Cameron will ever allow a Goddamned Blu-ray to be released of the original 1994 movie? Could it actually be fucking possible? Is it too much to ask about The Abyss?