Of Course ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Has Made a Billion Dollars Already

In the months before Avatar: Fire and Ash came out, James Cameron started making a few insinuations that he might be getting tired of making Avatar movies. First there was the desire to make things that weren’t blue-people-laden action epics at some point in the next few years, then there was his insinuation that maybe Fire and Ash wouldn’t be a box office darling, so he’d have to break out the powerpoint slides to tell us where it was all going should the movie fail to set the box office alight.

Well, the good (?) news for Cameron is that he can put the slides away: it doesn’t seem like the world, or at the very least Disney, is going to be done with Avatar any time yet.

Over the weekend the studio announced that, perhaps to the surprise of no one, Fire and Ash joined the rest of the Avatar series in smashing past a billion dollars internationally after its launch in mid-December. Thus far, Fire and Ash has made $306 million at the domestic box office, and $777.1 million worldwide.

Aside from securing Fire and Ash as the second-biggest global release of 2025 behind Zootopia 2—and giving Disney its third billion-dollar movie of the year alongside the live-action Lilo & Stitch remake—the news makes the Avatar series one of the rare movie franchises to have three films cross the billion-dollar threshold, let alone have the entire series do so.

Now, the question becomes whether or not Fire and Ash will join the other two Avatar movies in surpassing two billion dollars. The original 2009 film currently sits at an eye-watering $2.923 billion, while The Way of Water is at $2.320 billion, so Fire and Ash still has a bit of a way to go on that front. The film is currently about a weekend behind compared to the pace of the first two films, and Deadline currently alleges that early reporting suggests Fire and Ash could come short of that particular goal, grossing around $1.7 billion in its initial run—which would still be very impressive, but time will tell, and you can’t really count Avatar out given its defiant performance so far.

That includes Cameron himself, apparently. The director has already made it clear that while the stories for the fourth and fifth Avatar films have already been scripted—and parts of them have already been filmed—he’s more than ready to give Pandora a break for a little while, whether by finding other stories to tell in Avatar outside of the main narrative, or focusing on other projects, like a potential return to Terminator.

“I’ll have some time to write and to consider my next projects and the order in which I do them and so on once we’re done with the marketing on [Fire and Ash] in a month or so,” Cameron recently told io9 of the challenges of making a new Terminator. “I’ve got a stack of notes this thick [holds fingers about three inches apart], which is how I start all my scripts, on what I want to do with a new Terminator film. I’m going to pour myself into that as a writer.”

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