James Cameron stunned the world with Avatar in 2009, and despite having waited more than a decade to release his first sequel, Avatar: The Water Path has very quickly become one of the highest grossing films of all time. It seems that the appetite for the world of Pandora and the ecological history of the Na’vi has not subsided now that the film is streaming on Max and Disney+. According to new figures released by Nielsen, the Avatar sequel completely dominated the streaming world in June with 1.9 billion minutes watched in its first five days of release.
The closest challenger to Cameron’s epic came in the form of Netflix’s revival of Manifest, which reached its dramatic conclusion after the release of its last ten episodes, but even that fell massively short of Avatar: The Water Path. The other members of the top five were S. W. A. T, Never Have I Ever and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first major television project, F. U. B. A. R, which continued to prove that despite Avatar 2 taking the title, Netflix is still the real winner when it comes to streaming. Among the top ten of June, Netflix had claimed 7 of the entries, as can be seen below.
For Cameron, this is just one more reason to believe that his future planned sequels to the story will be nothing less than huge money spinning, and will help him secure his place as one of the most successful filmmakers of all time. With so many films having failed to recoup their excessively high budgets, Avatar: The Waterway had to be one of the biggest films of the last decade to be financially successful and he managed it with ease.
The Avatar Story Won’t Be Over For Almost A Decade
James Cameron originally revealed that his Avatar sequels would be released every two years starting in 2024. However, over the past few months, many productions have encountered obstacles caused by the WGA writers’ strike, and with an imminent actors’ strike still possible, the Avatar story will take much longer to tell than initially thought.
The latest delays, which have affected several franchises, have seen Avatar 3 pushed back from its initial release in 2024 to one in December 2025, Avatar 4 move back from 2026 to 2029 and Avatar 5 slide from 2028 to 2031. This is something that has already been addressed by Cameron, producer Jon Landau and stars such as Zoe Saldaña, who joked about how old she will be when the latest film finally comes out.
Of course, if there are new strikes or delays caused by shortages in the industry, another unexpected medical crisis or anything else that could possibly happen to the beleaguered world of filmmaking, then the Avatar story could end up taking even longer to tell. Let’s hope that for everyone involved, this is not the case.
