Pardon my absence, been at Disney World.

Black Panther 2 destroyed the box office for a second straight week, reaching just shy of $288 million in its first 10 days. It will probably be #3 on the year by the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, trailing only Maverick and Dr. Strange 2, which seems destined to fall as well.

10 days for $288 million - let's do some comparisons

Thor 4 was at $234 million after 10 days in the height of the summer
Dr. Strange 2 was slightly ahead after 10 days at $292 million, but it's third week was late May, and Maverick wiped it out on Memorial Day. Wakanda has no such threats.

all-time Marvel brand, BP2 is already up to 23rd all-time. That includes the earlier Spider-man and Fantasic Four incarnations. If it makes another $75 million this week, it'll be pushing into the top 15. $400 million is a dead pipe cinch, which only 11 Marvel movies have made.

Black Panther 2 cha-chinged $18.2 million on Black Friday, which should crest into a huge Saturday and Sunday. It also made $10 million on Wednesday and $8.1 million on Turkey Day, pushing it up to $339 million domestic through 15 days.

With almost $258 million international, it's a little shy of $600 million total gross.

$339 million domestic has pushed it up to 66th all-time already. If it makes $20 million Saturday and another $20 million on Sunday, which seems quite likely, it will be up into the top 50 all-time domestic and up to #3 for all of 2022 with another 17-18 days before Avatar 2 lands.

In the Marvel Pantheon, it is up to 17th, and will pass Love and Thunder on Saturday.

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That is pretty wild.

Also wild -- Zoe Saldana is about to add two more billion dollar movies to her resume.

SInce I'll be celebrating the debut of Avatar 2 by having a colonoscopy next Thursday (insert Way of the Water joke here), I thought I'd start early with the predictions on its box office from around the Internet to date.

BoxOffice Pro says $135m opening weekend, $475m domestic, which sounds way too low. That was on November 19th

Variety predicted $649m domestic on September 30th. That would be 10th all-time domestic.

The Wrap says $150m-$170m opening weekend but didn't make an overall guess. It does have the great quote from Cameron saying that it has to be the third or fourth-highest grossing film in history to break even. No pressure!

The Sports Geek has odds on the movie. Making over $150 million opening weekend is -120, and Under $150 million is +100. Some of its analysis is whether families will take their twitchy, Digital Age kids to a movie that lasts 3 hours and 18 minutes (plus previews and ads meaning a 4-hour experience).

Much like the success of Top Gun: Maverick this year, the way that the original Avatar made its money is worth a deep dive. While the Internet was already in full swing at the end of 2009, Twitter only had 28 million users and Facebook had 360 million users, as compared to 901 million a couple of years later, so a lot of movie talk was still message boards and good-old-fashioned word of mouth.

Avatar had a big opening weekend for 2009 - $77 million on Dec. 18-20th mostly because of "from the director of Titanic" and the spectacular way that the filmmakign was being hyped. I remember watching an extensive feature on "60 Minutes" on it.

Going straight into the week of Christmas, it made 3 straight days of $16 million, dipped to $11 million on a Christmas Eve Thursday, then went thermo-nuclear with $23 million on a Christmas Day Friday, $28 million on December 26th and $24 million on December 27th.

I can't imagine when the last time a big blockbuster's best day of its first 10 days was on Day 10, but that was the case here. The movie made $26.7 million on its opening day (Dec 18th) and $28 million on December 26th

That led it to make $77 million the first weekend and $75 million the second weekend. And its third weekend was New Year's Eve / New Year's Day, and it made $25 million more on each of those days, for a third-weekend total of $68 million.

Its first day under $10 million was January 4th, a Monday, when it still made $8 million. It didn't make less than $5 million in a day until January 13th, its 27th day of run. it pushed past Titanic on February 2, and made at least $10 million every Saturday until February 13th its 58th day of run, when it struggled to $9.2 million.

First day under $1 million was on March 8, its 81st day of release. It continued to make at least $1 million every Thursday and Friday until March 26th and 27th, by which time it was down to 930 theaters.