Having proven himself as the undisputed king of blockbuster cinema, nobody can hold a candle to James Cameron when it comes to delivering crowd-pleasing entertainment on a jaw-dropping and epic scale, so the Avatar: The Way of Water director has now found himself in direct competition with the one person he can’t defeat: James Cameron.
As expected, the sci-fi sequel is set to hold onto the top spot at the domestic box office for a seventh consecutive weekend, and only a few movies in the history of cinema have reigned at the summit of the charts for longer. As fate would have it, it’s been over 13 years since the last time a feature stayed in pole position for so long, and that film just so happened to be Avatar.
With Avengers: Endgame now officially the only one of the four highest-grossing releases of all-time that wasn’t directed by the man behind Titanic, three-time Academy Award winner Cameron has underlined, double-stamped, and capitalized his credentials as the defining populist entertainer of the modern era.
Unless M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin can pull off an upset next weekend, then The Way of Water is looking at repeating for an eighth time, something that hasn’t happened since Fatal Attraction way back in 1987.
Its rule is inevitably going too end sooner rather than later, though, with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania only a couple of weeks away, which would ironically see Cameron dislodged by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a franchise he’s not exactly a noted fan of.
