‘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.