'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Triples the Box Office Gross of Sam Worthington's Failed Sci-Fi Franchise Reboot

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Rahul Malhotra is a Weekend News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he'll watch anything once.

He has been writing for Collider for over two years, and has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal to introduce audiences to a whole new world of cinema.

Swing and a miss > measured victory. Also, #JusticeForHan. (He/Him).

With $1 billion in the bank already, director James Cameron's Avatar: Fire and Ash will now try to make the most of a relatively lean January and hit the $2 billion mark at the global box office. Both its predecessors, Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, were able to. But the new film has had an uphill climb from day one, having opened to relatively less enthusiastic reviews and suffering from a hint of franchise fatigue. Avatar 3 is still one of the top-grossing movies of the year, and will likely end its run with more than $1.5 billion at the global box office, but it's expected to fall short of the first two movies, which rank among the most successful of all time. Avatar remains the top-grossing movie in history, with around $2.9 billion in the bank; Avatar 2, on the other hand, grossed $2.3 billion during its theatrical run and is now the third-biggest film in history.

Avatar 3's running global haul of $1.1 billion means that it has grossed around twice as much as Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and thrice as much as Terminator Salvation. Released in the same year as the first Avatar movie, Salvation didn't involve Cameron at all. It was directed by McG and featured Avatar star Sam Worthington as the co-lead alongside Christian Bale. No prizes for guessing who pushed for Worthington to be cast in the movie, which grossed around $370 million at the global box office against a reported budget of $200 million. Cameron went on the record to praise Worthington's performance in the film, but told UGO that the movie didn't feel like "enough of a reinvention" and took a shortcut by replacing Arnold Schwarzenegger with a digital double.

'Avatar 3' Is the Lowest-Rated Installment of the Trilogy

In the years since, while Salvation has garnered a vocal cult of fans, Cameron has said that he unequivocally didn't like any of the Terminator sequels. This was when the filmmaker himself got involved as a producer and co-writer on Terminator: Dark Fate, which ended up becoming an even bigger bomb than Salvation. McG's movie is currently sitting at a 33% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, "With storytelling as robotic as the film's iconic villains, Terminator Salvation offers plenty of great effects but lacks the heart of the original films." Avatar 3, on the other hand, is now sitting at a 66% RT score — the lowest of the trilogy — as it chases bigger goals. You can watch the film in theaters, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.