Everything points to James Cameron performing his miracle again. Just 21 days after the release of a new “Avatar: The Way of Water” Worldwide box office receipts exceeded $1.5 billion. About a third of these come from the (final) North American market. Is cinema resurrected after two black years of the pandemic or not? The American director himself recently stated that Avatar has to break the $2 billion barrier to be considered “merely” successful.

By itself, the specific idea seems outrageous, because if the film does get there, it will not only be successful, but also become one of the top five highest-grossing of all time. On the other hand, a film costing around $500 million before advertising campaign clearly has different requirements than the average box office. In any case, the performance of the new Avatar is good news for the film industry, which has recovered significantly in 2022.

After all, there was another blockbuster this year that reached $1.4 billion in revenue. “Top Gun: Maverick”, while the first overall estimates from the US and UK report (now) a difference of around 30% compared to the year before the pandemic. This is mainly attributed to the lack of a sufficient number of commercial titles in cinemas in relation to 2019, but they argue that this factor will also be “corrected” by the end of this year.

In Greece, again, it’s a little harder to share the optimism. Around 5.4 million tickets were sold in 2022, which is certainly better than 3.2 million in 2021 (at that time, of course, theaters were closed for several months), but almost 45% worse than the corresponding figure in 2019 of the year. third weekend of the show, 260,000 tickets, a satisfying number only if we compare it with swallowing the rest of the box office. In our country, of course, there is also the phenomenon of an overabundance of new products, which does not allow especially little advertised titles to “breathe” in the hall and find their audience.

However, returning to the international scene, most of the assessments in favor of an almost complete recovery include the main condition: finding a balance between traditional (cinema) and online releases. Recently filmed in Greece, The Glass Bow, with an all-star cast, only took a week to play in theaters and only in select markets – for example, in our country it went straight to the platform.

Nevertheless, its performance showed that Netflix itself, which spent tens of millions to produce it, would have made a significant profit if it had given more viewers the opportunity and time to watch the film in theaters before sending it to the small screen. The latter has been acknowledged by Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings himself, foreshadowing (?) perhaps a different policy in the future.