‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Opens Huge — So Why Does It Feel So Off?
‘We were expecting a little bit more’: Richard & Sean look back on a rotten year and signs of optimism for 2026
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It’s a bit silly to suggest Avatar: Fire and Ash disappointed at the box office over the weekend with its $345 million worldwide debut, including $88 million in North America. But when the previous two movies combined to gross more than $5.2 billion globally, it’s no wonder Richard Rushfield senses “a note of underwhelment” around the opening, which was almost $50 million behind Avatar: The Way of Water in 2022.
Still, as Sean McNulty notes, typically when it comes to Avatar, it’s a marathon and not a sprint, as the franchise takes advantage of the two-week holiday break in December. “So the opening is a little bit low, but kind of a shrug emoji because this doesn’t really matter,” he says on Monday Morning Quarterbacks. “What matters is the next two weeks.”
The mixed bag debut of Avatar: Fire and Ash is par for the course for this year, which started with such high hopes and ends with a whimper: barely $9 billion in North American revenue, about 2 percent higher than 2024 and well below the totals in 2018 and 2019 (each year topped $11 billion).
“It didn’t quite come together,” Sean says, noting a lack of culturally significant hits at the top of the box office, where Zootopia 2 stands as the year’s highest-grossing movie in North America.
“You had the same number of big openings, but the depth of the box office is missing,” Richard says. “We have trained people to think that smaller films will be in their homes in a couple of weeks. That message has been received, and now we’re paying the price for that.”
Elsewhere in our final episode of the year, before hope springs in 2026 with top titles from Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg and Marvel’s Avengers: a big win for Angel Studios with David, Sydney Sweeney’s yo-yo year ends on a high with The Housemaid and Marty Supreme fever grips the six theaters in which it was released.