Avatar 3’s Box Office Decline Is Starting Early

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This film series is known for its sheer scale. The movies are epic in scope and were designed from the start as a five-part story, even before the second film came out. They have enormous budgets and consistently earn massive profits – Avatar still holds the record as the highest-grossing film of all time, briefly surpassed by Avengers: Endgame.

As a huge Avatar fan, I’m noticing something a little worrying. The first movie made an incredible $2.74 billion worldwide, and The Way of Water did really well with $2.32 billion. Now, Avatar: Fire & Ash is doing great – it just hit $1 billion and was number one in the US for four weeks! – but it’s not quite performing at the same level as the previous two films, which is a bit of a letdown.

According to Screendollars, as of January 11th, Fire & Ash had earned 80% and 66% of the domestic earnings of Avatar and The Way of Water at the same point in their theatrical runs, respectively. However, with the release of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple this weekend, Fire & Ash is likely to lose its number one position, ending a run of seven weeks at the top. Current projections estimate that Avatar 3 will earn approximately $1.4 billion worldwide.

Can Avatar Survive With A Smaller Audience?

© 20th Century Studios / courtesy Everett Collection

Typically, a box office result like this would be cause for celebration. It would place Avatar: Fire & Ash as the third highest-grossing film of 2025, surpassed only by the incredibly successful Ne Zha 2 and Zootopia 2, both of which performed exceptionally well in China. Overall, it would land the movie among the top 20 highest-grossing films of all time.

This is Avatar. James Cameron didn’t want to reveal the exact cost of these films in an interview about The Town, and it’s hard for outsiders to guess anyway, since The Way of Water and Fire & Ash were filmed at the same time. However, he did share this information:

Let me put it this way: the movie cost a huge amount of money – so much that we need to earn twice that amount just to break even. I’m confident the film will be profitable, but the real question is whether it will earn enough to make a sequel worthwhile.

While The Way of Water demonstrated there was interest in continuing the Avatar series, Fire & Ash is revealing just how large that audience truly is. This new film doesn’t have the advantage of a long wait since the previous movie, or the groundbreaking technology that accompanied it. The viewers coming now are genuinely invested in James Cameron’s vision and eager to follow the story, rather than simply being drawn to a memorable cinematic event. And that difference in motivation is significant, considering that the latter group contributed around $900 million to the box office.

Even though Fire & Ash saw a decline in viewers, most people who watched it will likely return for Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 if those movies are made. The big question now is whether that audience is large enough to justify making them. Director James Cameron recently discussed this on TVBS News.

The film industry is struggling at the moment. Avatar 3 was very expensive to make, so we need it to perform well financially if we want to keep making these movies. We also need to find ways to produce future Avatar films more affordably. If we decide to continue with a fourth movie, we’ll actually film both 4 and 5 at the same time.

Whether or not we get more Avatar movies largely depends on James Cameron. If Avatar 3 had reached $2 billion at the box office, Disney would probably have immediately approved the next two sequels. Now, Cameron needs to find a way to make the remaining films more affordably. While each Avatar movie has still earned a lot of money—likely over $1 billion—the fact that each one has made less than the previous film means Disney will be cautious about committing to two more expensive productions. They need to be sure the films will be profitable before giving the go-ahead.

The biggest challenge with Avatar is that it can’t afford to be any less epic to save money. The movie’s impressive scale is central to what fans love about it, and reducing that could mean losing viewers. So, James Cameron needs to find a way to succeed with potentially fewer people watching, without making the films themselves feel smaller in scope. Hopefully, he can achieve this.

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2026-01-15 00:11