Weekend Film Boxoffice Goes Upwards; "M3gan" on the 2023 Horizon

"The Way of Water" posted a 0.2% increase followed by The Last Wish (31%) and Wakenda (38%).  "The Fablemens" had a 53% increase and "I Want to Dance with Somebody" had only a 10% drop. 

Despite an underwhelming opening , "Way of Water's" third weekend has it ahead of "Avatar" and "Titanic."

Tom Cruise's "Top Gun Maverick" appears to be the top grossing film of 2022. The total boxoffice is $7.7 billion which is up from  2021 ($4.48B), but 
-34.3% below the last full pre-pandemic year of 2019 ($11.36B)  

The coming weekend shifts to a horror sub genre, evil doll premise (i.e. Child's Play, Annabelle, Magic) with "M3gan" a dominating wide release . 

Allison Williams (daughter of Brian Willams , formerly NBC's news anchor)  has re-teamed with Universal and Blumhouse (the backers of Get Out) for the James Wan-produced M3GAN, in which she plays a talented roboticist who creates a robot companion capable of sentient thought and murder.

She told Boxoffice,  "I couldn’t resist an ambiguous creator figure," she explained during the conversation with Wired. “When I think about the monster in Frankenstein, his last emotional stage is the realization of what has happened, why he’s there, how he got there, his innate flaws, that he’s mismatched with the world."    Artificial intelligence and the internet have brought about full size talking and conversing mannequins. A feature is upcoming where the lead will be played by an AI doll.