Blu-ray Sales: June 18-24

Here’s the latest from Blu-ray.com

For the week that ended on June 24th, Walt Disney Home Entertainment and 20th Century Studios’ Avatar: The Way of Water unsurprisingly topped both the the Blu-ray-only and overall packaged media charts in its debut week. Finally released in December 2022, Avatar: The Way of Water found a theatrical marketplace that had changed dramatically from when Avatar took cinemas worldwide by storm in December 2009 and then kickstarted the Blu-ray 3D format on home video. A sequel was first mooted by Cameron during the production of Avatar as far back as 2006, with initial plans for sequels to be released throughout the 2010s. Filming on the project, which took place largely in New Zealand and involved a mix of performance capture and standard live-action filming, eventually commenced in 2017 and would continue on and off for the next three years, culminating in a controversial decision by the New Zealand government to allow Cameron and his crew back into the country in June 2020, at the height of the global lockdown from the coronavirus pandemic. On top of that, the studio that greenlit the film, 20th Century Fox, was acquired by Disney in 2019. As so much time had passed, it was possible that Disney had a massive box-office bomb on its hands, considering that the film’s budget is said to be several hundred million dollars. Ultimately, while Avatar: The Way of Water didn’t quite reach the incredible box office heights of its predecessor, the sequel has been an unmitigated success…

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