Avatar: Fire & Ash Hits Major Box Office Milestone in Just 4 Days, Already Beating 8 Other Disney Movies From 2025

Avatar: Fire & Ash is already blowing up the box office, with a huge opening weekend that takes it past several other Disney releases. The success of the previous Avatar movies creates huge expectations for James Cameron’s third installment, with both of them passing the $2 billion mark, and the first standing as the highest-grossing movie of all time. It’d be unfair to expect Fire & Ash to surpass that, but nonetheless the benchmark for success with this movie is at least coming close to $2bn.

Avatar: Fire & Ash‘s opening box office hasn’t quite ignited the same way The Way of Water did, with a global haul of $345m from its first four days (including Thursday previews), compared to that film’s $435m opening en route to a final total of $2.3bn. Still, it’s a massive number in its own right, especially in a year that, the past month aside, hasn’t seen a lot of movies go truly big at the box office. It’s enough to catapult it straight into the top 20 of 2025 (at #17), per Box Office Mojo, and it’s overtaken the full grosses of several theatrical releases from Disney’s various studios, including:

• Snow White: $205m
• Predator: Badlands: $183m
• Elio: $154m
• Freakier Friday: $153m
• The Amateur: $96m
• Tron: Ares: $142m
• Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere: $44m
• Ella McCay: $4m

How Much Will Avatar: Fire & Ash Make?

Although Avatar: Fire & Ash‘s opening box office is impressive and important, historically that’s not what defines an Avatar movie. It’s common nowadays for movies to live or die based on that first weekend, but Cameron’s franchise is notable for its incredible legs through the holiday period and well into the new weekend, with repeat viewings, often in premium (i.e. more expensive) formats driving up the ticket sales, and that could well be the case again here.

There are a few reasons for optimism on how far Fire & Ash‘s box office can go. The fact that people will want to go see it in IMAX, where there are fewer screens and thus more sold out showings, is part of why these movies have such strong legs, so there should still be plenty to come there.

There’s no four-quadrant blockbuster or IMAX competition, so while things like The Housemaid and Marty Supreme will draw an audience, it shouldn’t be taking away from Avatar. And the movie’s weaker reviews might have hurt its box office debut – it has just 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, the franchise’s lowest – but word of mouth is very positive: 91% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, and an A CinemaScore, which are both comparable to The Way of Water.

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That should all add up to Fire & Ash being an absolute box office hit, even with a production budget reportedly around $350-400m (giving it a breakeven point of around $1bn). But it might not be enough to hit $2bn. The Way of Water‘s final total was 5.2x its global opening weekend, which is a sign of its astonishing legs. Even if Fire & Ash can hit that same multiplier, it’ll end up with just shy of $1.8bn. It’d need a multiplier of roughly 5.7-5.8 to hit the $2bn mark, which is not impossible, but would be quite the feat to pull off.

In terms of Disney movies, though, it is well on course to become the highest-grossing of 2025. There are currently five above it in the Top 20, including three MCU movies, the Lilo & Stitch remake, and Zootopia 2 (as the table below shows). It could blow past Marvel in its second weekend, and should overtake the others, leaving this as the undisputed #1 for Disney and the year’s biggest Hollywood movie (currently the Zooptopia sequel), but with a real fight to be the biggest overall, which is currently Ne Zha 2 on $1.9bn.

Avatar: Fire & Ash is now playing in theaters.

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