“This can’t possibly be happening again, can it? No, it’s just the pre-holiday rush, plus those who missed out due to the weekend snowstorm… right?
You don’t suppose…?” — Scott Mendelson, December 23, 2009
(as you hit play on James Horner’s “Unable to Stay, Unwilling to Leave”)
James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash earned $13.3 million on Monday, declining 46% from its $24.26 million Sunday gross and then followed that up with a $16.5 million (+24%) Tuesday gross. That put James Cameron’s latest sci-fi actioner at $119 million in five days, thanks to a smaller Sunday-to-Monday drop (-55% for a $16 million day four gross) but and a larger Monday-to-Tuesday jump than Avatar: The Way of Water (-55% and $16 million on Monday and then +125% and $18.3 million on Tuesday in 2022). That’s also the second-biggest Tuesday gross of 2025, behind Superman ($17.5 million, coming off a $125 million opening weekend), and already positions the film at 1.33x its Fri-Sun opening weekend.
It has earned 1.33x its $89 million Fri-Sun opening weekend, compared to 1.42x for Avatar but 1.25x for The Way of Water. Noting the ups and downs of when Christmas Eve and Christmas Day fell each year, it’s currently leggier than the vast majority of big year-end tentpoles that opened on a Friday (sorry to King Kong and Frodo Baggins) just before Christmas. The only such leggier pre-Christmas tentpoles since 2009 are/were the Aquaman movies (which had Christmas Day fall upon, respectively, day five in 2018 and day four in 2023) and the stupidly leggy even by holiday standards Mufasa: The Lion King (1.4x its $35 million debut in 2024 before legging out to $255 million domestically).
20th Century Studios’ Avatar 3 concluded its first full week of worldwide play with a $450 million worldwide cume, after earning $50.7 million on Monday and $50.8 million on Tuesday. That includes (counting Wednesday), including a decent (if not superlative by Pandora-ian standards) $72 million five-day total in China. It should pass $500 million worldwide late tonight or early tomorrow. Of note, Fire and Ash opened nearly identically in North America (sans inflation) to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ($84 million in 2012) but then more-than-doubled that film’s respective Tuesday gross. Also, its first Tuesday was 47% below that of Spider-Man: No Way Home ($33 million in 2021), coming off a 66% smaller opening weekend ($260 million).
Optimistically speaking, legs like The Way of Water from this point ($685 million from a $169 million five-day total) “only” get Fire and Ash to $481 million domestically. Less optimistically, a from-here-on-out domestic multiplier like Aquaman ($335 million from $105 million five-day cume) gets Avatar 3 to around $377 million. However, with $331 million overseas thus far, a concurrent continued 26/74 domestic/overseas split would then give it a mere $1.423 billion worldwide finish. More optimistically, a 26/74 split for $481 million domestic would total $1.815 billion globally. While I’m not *quite* ready to declare “That sonovabitch, he did it again,” that may just be a distrust of my own optimism. Naw, fuck this… I’m calling it.
