After years in the making and months of pre-release hype, Avatar: Fire and Ash touches down in theaters on Friday, looking to equal (though likely not surpass) the $2 billion-plus grosses of its predecessors. It’s a safe stance to never bet against King of the Box Office James Cameron, especially on the global stage. The Avatar films have traditionally seen their biggest grosses overseas, and Fire and Ash should have little trouble packing theater at home and abroad during its opening weekend.
The question is, will audiences come back and take the nearly three-and-a-half-hour ride again and again? Certainly, the waiting period between the second and third installments is the shortest in the franchise’s history, which means moviegoer anticipation might not be where it was when Avatar: The Way of Water opened in theaters in 2022 — a full 13 years after the 2009 original. And the Sully clan also has to battle for family eyeballs with Zootopia 2, which just crossed the billion-dollar mark globally and is half the runtime of Fire and Ash.
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On the other hand, few directors serve up super-sized spectacle like Cameron, and this latest chapter goes hard on the action set-pieces, including a lengthy final battle that riffs on everything from Moby Dick to 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are also moments of lore-building that build towards the fourth and fifth installments, which the director plans to release in 2029 and 2031. Or, if the feature films fall apart, he may put those between the pages of a pulp sci-fi novel — the kind that inspired Avatar in the first place.
We’ll have to wait until this weekend to see how audiences weigh in, but the critical word of mouth on Fire and Ash is falling on the lower end of the spectrum for the franchise. The movie currently has a 61 percent favorable rating on Metacritic and a slightly higher 72 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney comes in on the low end, arguing: “Yes, the movie offers gargantuan-scale spectacle, imposing technological wizardry and virtually nonstop action involving over-qualified and mostly unrecognizable actors in motion-capture suits. But it’s easily the most repetitious entry in the big-screen series, with a been-there, bought-the-T-shirt fatigue that’s hard to ignore.”
“The 13-year gap between Avatar and its first sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, allowed time for a renewed sense of awe at the scope of Cameron’s bio-diverse worldbuilding, enhanced by the introduction of a new clan, new creatures and a distinctive new environment,” he continues. “The third movie arrives just three years after its immediate predecessor — and in narrative terms, a few weeks after the events of that film — with the novelty now wearing thin.”
But Screen International‘s Tim Grierson has a counter to that charge. “It is as visually extraordinary as its predecessors and, while the film contains some of those earlier pictures’ weaknesses, the deficiencies are starting to feel like charming quirks in an otherwise transporting series,” he argues. “By this point, the novelty of Pandora should have waned, but credit Cameron and production designers Dylan Cole and Ben Procter for finding fresh ways to make this world layered and gorgeous.”
Writing in The AV Club, Jesse Hassenger also says that Cameron “still delivers” despite the butt-numbing length. “Fire and Ash… carries the constant, looming threat that it will feel something like a normal sequel. Not a long-awaited event, not a radical expansion or re-envisioning of its predecessor, not even Cameron’s first film of the decade. Just another spectacular, near-ceaselessly entertaining fantasy epic that shames 90 percent of its big-ticket competition. You know, one of those.”
“Fire and Ash is terrific entertainment that occasionally gives the impression of well-appointed vamping,” he adds. “It’s almost enough to wonder if all the meticulous writer’s-room blueprinting of two-to-four Avatar sequels might have done as much harm as good. Viewers who just long for more time in Pandora are in luck: Cameron may not see a way out himself.”
But the BBC’s Nichola Barber has no desire to stick around for more Pandora antics. “Each Avatar so far has been longer and worse than the one before, and this one… is 197 minutes of screensaver graphics, clunky dialogue, baggy plotting and hippy-dippy new-age spirituality,” he writes in his earnest pan. “It’s terrifying to think that Cameron still has two more sequels scheduled. How much longer and more self-indulgent can they possibly get?”
If Avatar 4 holds to its 2029 release date, we’ll have four years to find out.
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