How Avatar: Fire and Ash Can Still Break $2 Billion at the Box Office

Over its debut weekend, Avatar: Fire and Ash touched a flame to the wick of impending blockbusterdom, hauling in a decent-ish $88 million in North American cinemas. That figure is a far cry from the box-office bonfire of Avatar: The Way of Water — which opened to $134 million in 2022 — and comes in a tad below pre-release “tracking” estimates (they predicted Avatar 3 would gross between $90 million and $105 million over its first three days in theaters). But James Cameron’s Na’vi space-epic threequel is still well poised to join the three-comma club. While Fire and Ash failed to spark joy for many critics, Avatars are generally considered critic-proof. And given the dearth of competing megabudget event titles in the weeks ahead, it could play strongly through February, giving Fire and Ash a good chance of hitting a cumulative gross north of $2 billion like its franchise predecessors.

Overseas, meanwhile, Avatar 3 took in an additional $257 million this weekend to rank in the top percentile of this year’s worldwide debuts. All of which makes it that much more surprising to consider the generally accepted pop-punditry wisdom that the franchise has “no fans.” That Avatar “has become internet shorthand for hollow commercialism” (as the entertainment-industry newsletter The Ankler puts it). That the multiple-Oscar-winning first Avatar became the top-grossing movie of all time before vanishing from the Zeitgeist, “leaving almost no pop cultural impact to speak of” (Forbes). And that Cameron’s fantastical film series — plotted around a CGI Eden teeming with catlike ten-foot-tall blue aliens as well as various talking whales, marauding pterodactyl species and glow-in-the-dark trees of life — does not seem to inspire the same kind of cosplay, cinematic-universe zealotry, or fan fervor that have come to define modern blockbuster franchises.

“What Cameron has done is create the extremely rare multibillion-dollar sci-fi franchise that does not have a massive audience feeling like they need to rush out and see his movies opening weekend,” says Fandango’s director of movie analytics and owner-founder of Box Office Theory Shawn Robbins. “Every other massive franchise over the last 15 years — Star Wars or Harry Potter or the Twilight series — did so well not only because of the size of the fan base but because it had fans rushing out opening weekend to avoid the fear of missing out. To avoid having the movies be spoiled by spoilers. How many franchises can earn a billion dollars without having a record-breaking opening weekend? Ninety-nine percent of them cannot. But James Cameron is the one percent.”

Carrying a reported $400 million production budget (with a Tulkun-size prints and advertising budget of between $150 million and $200 million courtesy of its studio distributor Disney), Fire and Ash needs to clear at least $1.2 billion globally to break even — no small order when you keep in mind that fewer than 60 movies have entered ten-digit territory to date. Moreover, as the middle child of a planned five-film narrative arc, Avatar 3 faces a certain amount of all-but-inevitable franchise fatigue. Especially arriving just three years shy of The Way of Water’s theatrical splashdown. (Thirteen years elapsed between the first two Avatars, creating a generational-curiosity factor around the second installment.) Add in the primary critical knock against the three-hour-and-17-minute Fire and Ash — that it “continues the same conflict of the prior films” and “may feel to some like a franchise cannibalizing itself” — and it would seem that the anti-colonialist space allegory has its work cut out.

Worth keeping in mind, however: Industry observers tend to doubt Cameron’s ability to trump all box-office logic at their own peril. Both 2009’s Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water managed to respectively maintain the No. 1 spot at the box office for a staggering seven consecutive weekends en route to making movie history. A1 went on to become the top-grossing movie of all time (with $2.92 billion in receipts) and A2 racked up $2.3 billion worldwide (making it the third-most-successful movie ever).

According to Exhibitor Relations senior box-office analyst Jeff Bock, where most movies front-load their earnings over opening weekend then face steep subsequent-weekend drop-offs, Avatars seem to play by a different set of rules. Fire and Water is likely to really start burning up the box office during its second and third weeks of release in the midst of the crowded but lucrative Christmas-holiday corridor — up against a host of smaller films including the Timothée Chalamet ping-pong dramedy Marty Supreme (which earned an astonishing $875,000 in limited release in just six theaters this weekend), the Amanda Seyfried–starring surrealist musical biopic The Testament of Ann Lee, the Jack Black–Paul Rudd comedy two-hander Anaconda, and Hugh-Jackman-in-a-weird-wig Neil Diamond jukebox musical Song Sung Blue.

“I know that break-even point is insane, but Avatar: Fire and Ash will surpass that,” Bock says. “I would be shocked if it didn’t get to $1.5 billion worldwide. The drop-offs between the first and second weeks are going to be negligible. Because of the weak slate in January and February, this thing is going to play in IMAX, in all these premium large-format screens, for months. As we go into weekends seven, eight, and nine we’re going to see amazing legs like we’ve seen in the past from James Cameron.”

The first couple months of any year tend to be a cinematic graveyard where Hollywood theatrically buries movies in which it has the shakiest financial faith. Hence the January arrival of titles like Gerard Butler’s Greenland 2: Migration, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and the Chris Pratt-vs.-a-marauding-AI-judge thriller Mercy. Multiplex offerings somewhat improve in February with Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi (February 13) and Scream 7 (February 27). “Until then, Avatar 3 can dominate those screens,” says Robbins. “Right now, people are on vacation and off school. You have what ends up being a 17-day weekend for box office. A lot can happen by the end of those 17 days with a movie like Avatar.”