Currently the highest-grossing movie is Avengers: Endgame, with made $2.79B worldwide.
https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/cumulative/all-time
I'm giving the market an extra year to resolve post-movie-release date to give all of the worldwide gross earnings time to roll in.
1,000
3.00The remaining Avatars just got delayed, so now the only one set to come out before the deadline is Avatar 3. It's unlikely to break $3B, and it's the only prime time for an Avatar 1 re-issue to mop up the remaining $76.3M it needs to cross the line. That would mean outperforming its last re-release (by a tiny margin), which doesn't seem too likely.
@ScipioFabius Yup. I made the market before Way of Water was out, so the re-release possibility hadn't occurred to me. But clearly this one release was enough to scoop up an extra 100M-ish for the original Avatar. Wouldn't surprise me if another rerelease would push it over the finish line.
What would steal the crown from Endgame or Avatar? Those two lead the pack by a huge margin. Endgame had 10 years of buildup as the capstone to the whole MCU up to that point. Avatar had era-defining VFX in 3D and the hype of being James Cameron's first blockbuster since Titanic, another record-setter a dozen years before.
The MCU is beginning to flag, and still none of its competitors can touch it. Even a new Star Wars can't crack $1.5B these days. Avatar 5 might be the most promising $3B-er on the horizon, if 3 and 4 are huge hits, but I don't think it's scheduled to come out by the deadline.
My hunch is that if this does resolve YES, the real 'winner' might be inflation.
@Jonagold I was mostly thinking inflation. But maybe some other low probabilities:
Something like 8k vr (insert current buzzword) Avatar remaster and it counts towards the original. Yeah they already did that, but poor studios gotta earn money somehow.
It actually grossed well above 3b when counting dvds, blu-rays and whatnot. Maybe they start including streaming rights into the box office number.
I rarely go to the cinema, but I see that a lot of the stuff nowadays is available in 4dx 3d, and I think that costs like 3-4x the regular ticket price 10 years ago. So part inflation part new tech.
USD drops a lot against CNY and China makes some kind of a domestic and international super hit or some other big movie gets allowed in China. Spider-Man: No Way Home earned ~2b in total but 0 in China.
