Praise Eywa! The Path to Pandora is complete. Avatar: Fire And Ash is playing in cinemas around the world. And James Cameron’s eagerly awaited sci-fi threequel, the follow-up to 2022 juggernaut The Way Of Water, is proving the old adage true once more: never bet against Jim. Pipped to the post as 2025’s biggest opening weekend only by Disney’s Zootropolis 2 ($556m), Cameron’s three-hour epic blazed a hefty $345 million box office trail across its first four days in cinemas.
Now, box office boffins will be quick to note that Fire And Ash‘s $345 million haul, split between $88 million made domestically in the US and $257 million from international audiences, marks a noticeable drop off from The Way Of Water‘s $435 million open back in 2022. It’s worth considering however that a new Avatar for the first time in 13 years and the arrival of another — positioned as much as TWOW Part II as Avatar 3 — just three years later are two very different prospects. Also worth noting is that the Avatar franchise has never lived and died on the strength of an opening weekend, but rather the movies’ staying power in cinemas, and with two-thirds of the audiences for Fire And Ash so far opting for 3D and IMAX 3D experiences, there’s a clear indicator that cinemagoers are still willing to wait for the right time to watch Cameron’s 197-minute behemoth in the optimal format.
With critical response to Fire And Ash a little more mixed than with The Way Of Water as we head into the Christmas holidays, only time will tell if the latest Avatar — heading into cinemas armed with exclusive Avengers: Doomsday teasers and a full-on prologue for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — is destined to hit the box office heights of its predecessors. But we said it up top and we’ll say it again: never bet against Jim. And never bet against the denizens of the internet, who can — and likely will — watch Fire And Ash multiple times just to take another hit of whatever Varang has Quaritch smoking. Back to the Mangkwan hut we go!
