Avatar this week has become the top grossing movie released globally in 2022, it is yet to be the top grossing movie of 2022 in North America and Canada or the UK.

The James Cameron directed sequel to Avatar has taken over $1.5 Billion at the global box office, with China, Japan, Europe and Australia showing good figures for the movie.

The current tally of global grosses is

• North America and Canada $471.8 Million
• China $171.5 Million
• France $97 Million
• Germany $79.5 Million
• Korea $79.2 Million
• United Kingdom and Ireland $62.1 Million
• India $52.4 Million
• Australia $40.8 Million
• Mexico $40.6 Million
• Italy $35.7 Million
• Spain $33.3 Million
• Brazil $27.2 Million
• Japan $20.7 Million

In the UK the top grossing movie of 2022 is Top Gun: Maverick which took an amazing £83.5 Million during its summer run, the Avatar sequel still has a bit to go to catch up.

In North America and Canada the Top Gun sequel took $717 Million on its 24 week run, and with Avatar: The Way of Water still pulling in good numbers, and an increase in screen this weekend couples with little competition until Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in mid February its looking likely the movie will go ahead.

It was an interesting year at the box office in 2022, there were some big disappointments, but its looks like there were 3 Billion dollar movies as well as a couple which got close.

One of those movie will most likely go over the $2 Billion mark, the first time that has happened since Avengers: Endgame in 2019 (pre-pandemic), although Spider-Man: No Way Home came very close in 2021.

See the full list of the highest grossing global box office movies.

Deadline are reporting that director Stephen Daldry has left the screen adaptation of hit stage show Wicked.

The film has been in development since at least 2016, but due to scheduling conflicts and other problems it is still in pre-production hell.

The movie was originally scheduled for release on December 20th 2019, ironically the same release date as Cats, another stage to screen adaption which was hit with a very harsh critical panning.

Universal, who own the screen rights, will still go ahead with the adaptation, but they wanted to proceed faster than Daldry was moving ahead with development, and as Deadline reports there is currently no sound stage in the UK free for production to start, and the director was keen to film in England.

There is no need to worry as there are a number of high profile directors ready to take over, including Steven Spielberg who is keen to adapt another stage show after he directed West Side Story, which has been delayed until December 2021.

Source Deadline.