• by Wayne Friedman , January 9, 2023

Four weeks in, Disney/20th Century Studio's “Avatar: The Way of Water” has brought a wave of big box-office dollars -- $45 million over the most recent three-day weekend period, according to Comscore.

It now stands as the seventh-highest-grossing global movie release of all time, grossing $1.71 billion -- $517 million domestically and 1.19 billion internationally.

This exceeds “The Lion King” (2019) at $1.66 billion and “Jurassic World”(2022) at $1.67 billion.

Disney/20th Century Studio's “Avatar: The Way of Water” has spent $32.7 million on national TV advertising for its entire campaign so far, according to estimates from iSpot.tv, and has delivered 2.15 billion impressions from 8,168 airings.

Impressions here are defined as total ad exposures from national linear TV, national time-shifted, local, video-on-demand, and over-the-top platforms.

Flying somewhat under the radar in second place for the weekend was new horror flick “M3GAN” from Universal Pictures, earning $30.2 million domestically and $14.8 million internationally.

Universal did all this with a modest U.S. national TV advertising spend so far -- $7.95 million to date, according to iSpot.tv estimates, yielding 504.1 million impressions from 1,643 airings.

Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore, says its performance is in line with other recent horror films at the same point in time and the same markets. That list includes “Smile”, “Invisible Man” and “The Black Phone” and is higher than “Halloween Ends” and “Happy Death Day.”