James Cameron’s third Avatar movie, Fire and Ash, has done the expected and set the global box office on fire with a $345 million opening weekend. That’s big — the third-biggest opening of 2025 — but it’s some way off the opening of Avatar: The Way of Water, which earned $441.7 million in 2022. It’s also over $200 million behind the record-breaking $556.4 million opening of Disney’s previous hit, Zootopia 2.
While Avatar: Fire and Ash is still a huge hit internationally, U.S. audiences were in noticeably less of a hurry to see it on opening weekend. Its $88 million domestic opening is the ninth biggest of the year, far behind the likes of A Minecraft Movie ($162.8 million), Wicked: For Good ($147 million), and Superman ($125 million), and even beaten (just) by Captain America: Brave New World ($88.8 million).
That just goes to show how strong Fire and Ash is internationally, including in China, where it joins Zootopia 2 in presenting something of a comeback for Hollywood movies at the Chinese box office. Avatar: Fire and Ash earned $57.6 million in China and a very strong $109.4 million across Europe.
All of this is par for the course for Avatar movies, which have earned the majority — over 70%, in all cases — of their gargantuan box office takings overseas. It’s the international box office that powered the first Avatar and The Way of Water to first and third in the list of the highest-grossing films of all time. That’s very different to the likes of the Wicked movies, which have earned over 60% of their box office domestically.
As Deadline points out, Avatar movies also tend to have a much longer tail at the box office than the front-loaded hits Hollywood tends to pump out these days. With their spectacular visuals and long runtimes, they are appointment viewing in the best and biggest theaters, while their late December release dates mean they tend to draw audiences through the holiday season and well into January.
So there’s little doubt that Fire and Ash will be another hit for Cameron and power its way past $1 billion at the global box office, when all is said and done. But will it make it into the rarefied $2-billion-plus club, like both its predecessors? We’ll have to wait and see.
