The future of James Cameron's ambitious Avatar saga is uncertain after Avatar: Fire and Ash earned significantly less than its predecessors, raising concerns at Disney about the next instalment's financial viability. This is despite the 2025 film being one of the year's biggest releases, with nearly $1.5 billion at the global box office.
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The first Avatar film (2009) remains the highest-grossing movie in history with more than $2.9 billion, while Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) collected around $2.3 billion globally. Compared to these numbers, the third film has seen a clear drop.
This is a concern because the Avatar movies are extremely expensive to make. Fire and Ash alone reportedly cost over $400 million, and that does not include marketing. Since theatres keep a large share of ticket sales, a film like this needs to earn well over $1 billion just to recover its costs. Studios like Disney expect huge profits from such projects, not just break-even numbers.
This makes Avatar 4 a big financial risk for Disney, especially at a time when the company's new CEO Josh D'Amaro is looking closely at the performance of its biggest franchises. Even though the Avatar series is still the only film trilogy to cross $6 billion at the global box office, the steady fall in earnings from one film to the next has forced the studio to rethink its future, according to reports.
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James Cameron has also admitted in earlier interviews about the financial challenges of continuing the series at its current scale and the need to control their budgets. He has said that the story of Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 will be even bigger in scale, which means Disney would have to approve two massive projects at once — something that now seems difficult.
Despite the uncertainty, Cameron has alternative plans to conclude the saga if additional films do not materialise. He has spoken about the possibility of finishing the story in book form and has also expressed interest in pursuing other projects, including Ghosts of Hiroshima.
For now, Avatar: Fire and Ash is still running in theatres, and the fate of the next chapter will depend on whether its final box office numbers can justify another huge investment.
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