Avatar: Fire and Ash‘s box office hot streak is cooling down significantly.
2025’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, which is the third installment in James Cameron’s record-smashing sci-fi franchise, debuted on December 19 with the second-biggest opening weekend of the trilogy. However, it only held No. 1 on the domestic chart for five weekends before being usurped by the Chris Pratt movie Mercy, falling short of the previous movies’ seven-week streaks at No. 1.
Per Deadline, as of Saturday morning, Avatar: Fire and Ash is projected to earn a 3-day total of $3.2 million by the end of its eighth weekend in theaters. This will see it landing at No. 8 on the domestic Top 10 chart for the weekend. Mercy previously pushed it to No. 2, and it fell to No. 5 the following weekend behind the new releases Send Help, Iron Lung, and Melania.
This weekend, while Melania dropped below Fire and Ash, the new releases Solo Mio, Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience, Dracula, and The Strangers: Chapter 3 all debuted above it, pushing it out of the Top 5 completely.
This is the quickest that any installment from the franchise has dropped out of the Top 5, as the original 2009 movie held on for 12 weekends while 2022’s The Way of Water spent 11 weekends on the chart. Below, see a breakdown of the Avatar movies‘ chart positions during the first 13 weekends of their respective runs:
Wk 1
Wk 2
Wk 3
Wk 4
Wk 5
Wk 6
Wk 7
Wk 8
Wk 9
Wk 10
Wk 11
Wk 12
Wk 13
Avatar
#1
#1
#1
#1
#1
#1
#1
#2
#4
#3
#4
#5
#7
Avatar: The Way of Water
#1
#1
#1
#1
#1
#1
#1
#3
#2
#2
#4
#6
#8
Avatar: Fire and Ash
#1
#1
#1
#1
#1
#2
#5
#8
TBD
TBD
TBD
TBD
TBD
While it is possible that some of the new releases that debuted above the James Cameron movie could drop below it during its ninth weekend, it seems unlikely that the movie will rise back up into the Top 5 at any point through the end of the Avatar: Fire and Ash theatrical release.
While horror releases and concert movies such as Stray Kids and The Strangers can have brutal sophomore weekend drops, titles such as Send Help, Iron Lung, Solo Mio, and even Zootopia 2 (which is in its 11th weekend) remain comfortably above Avatar 3.
During Fire and Ash’s ninth weekend, those four titles will be joined by incoming releases including Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. As the weeks pass, titles such as A24’s How to Make a Killing, Scream 7, and Pixar’s Hoppers will also join the fray, likely locking Avatar out of the Top 5 for good.
This is not necessarily a death knell for Avatar: Fire and Ash, however. While the franchise is showing diminishing returns, and it seems unlikely that the new movie will gross more than $2 billion like its predecessors, it has already earned more than $1.4 billion worldwide, making it the 18th highest-grossing movie of all time.
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Release Date
December 19, 2025
Runtime
197 Minutes
