Avengers:Infinity War breaks opening weekend box office record (worldwide and domestic)

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StreaK said:

AnmolRed said:

True, and movies being available for stramings soon after release doesmdo help either, especially with high ticket prices.

Yet Avatar managed to make close to $3 billion worldwide and no other movie even comes close to kicking it off #1 (not including inflation.) It was in 2009 - entertainment was no different really than it is now. Bottomline is, if the movie calls for it people WILL go to the cinema to see it. It has to be a particular movie, though. 

I honestly thought TFA would be the ONLY movie to come close to beating Avatar yet it didn't even come close either. Anyway, I doubt IW will beat TWA's worldwide. If it does then seriously WOW!

It's actually quite a bit more different than the short timespan would imply.

Both 3D and  full feature movies in IMAX where all new back then, and that movie was hailed to be THE movie to watch in any of both formats. Keep in mind most in cinemas the movies were still shown in 2K, so the jump to 8K was a massive one and one which was pretty visible too.

The pricegap between 2D, 3D and IMAX was also much bigger back then than it is today. 3D and IMAX barely got more expensive, it's mostly just 2D who catched up in price. Since many bought the more expensive tickets for this movie, the total amount of moviegoers is lower than the high gross seems to allude to.

Third, it came out at the nick of time, when ecology with climate change and racial equality became really big, two of the main themes of the movie. This was especially true in europe, hence why the ticket sales there really exploded.

Finally, streaming wasn't really a thing yet, as download speeds and codecs didn't allow for good picture quality while streaming yet (Youtube was still 240-360p mostly). For such a movie praised for it's extraordinary visuals, the weak picture quality of streaming platforms just didn't cut it, and downloading the movie took forever with the download speeds of the time.

A minor point which could have contributed or not is also the fact that the amount of cinema screens has been shrinking for decades now, and Avatar had some more screens left than nowadays movies do. The reason why I'm not sure if this contributed or not is that while the amount of screens has been reducing, the screenings have more seats now than in the past, balancing this out most likely.