It’s coming up on 13 years since the last time James Cameron first took viewers to Pandora, the Yes album cover-esque planet first depicted in 2009’s Avatar. Given the giant elapse in time — and that its cultural footprint isn’t that huge, apart from some mega-fans seen in an episode of How to with John Wilson — you may doubt whether people still want to hang with the blue Na’vi. But judging from how many people watched the sequel’s first teaser trailer in its first 24 hours online, Cameron need not worry.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, the teaser nabbed the second-highest amount of views for a trailer in a single day, shy of only the one for F9: The Fast Saga. Disney and 20th Century claim that, worldwide, the first look at Avatar: The Way of Water nabbed a whopping 148.6 milion views. Of those, 23 million were from China alone.
To put that in perspective, that’s more than Black Widow (116.8 million views), Incredibles 2 (113.1 million), and Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker (112.4 million). The only one with more than Avatar 2 is the aforementioned F9, which amassed 202.7 million online views in its first 24 hours on the information superhighway.
Mind you, this wasn’t the trailer’s proper debut. It actually first appeared before Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness last weekend, meaning that all the people who saw it — and it made $180.5 million domestically plus nearly $450 million overseas — had already seen the Avatar first teaser. Perhaps people just really enjoy grooving on its serene surveys of Pandora, a realm unseen since the first Obama administration.
You can watch the new Avatar sequel teaser above.
(Via THR)