'Avatar' marks 6 straight weeks at No. 1 as it surpasses $2 billion in ticket sales

Posted By TheNewsCommenter: From Npr.org: “'Avatar' marks 6 straight weeks at No. 1 as it surpasses $2 billion in ticket sales”. Below is an excerpt from the article.

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Jake Sully, portrayed by Sam Worthington, in "Avatar: The Way of Water." AP hide caption

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Jake Sully, portrayed by Sam Worthington, in "Avatar: The Way of Water."

NEW YORK — James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water led ticket sales in movie theaters for the sixth straight weekend, making it the first film to have such a sustained reign atop the box office since 2009's Avatar.

The Walt Disney Co.'s The Way of Water added $19.7 million in U.S. and Canadian theaters over the weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday. Its global total has now surpassed $2 billion, putting it sixth all-time and just ahead of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Domestically, The Way of Water is up to $598 million. Continued robust international sales ($56.3 million for the weekend) has helped push the Avatar sequel to $2.024 billion worldwide.

A year ago, Spider-Man: No Way Home also topped the box office for six weekends, but did it over the course of seven weeks. You have to go back to Cameron's original Avatar to find a movie that stayed No. 1 for such a long span. (Avatar ultimately topped out at seven weeks.) Before that, the only film in the past 25 years to manage the feat was another Cameron film; "Titanic" (1997) went undefeated for 15 weeks.

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