Avatar 3 Still Trails as Zootopia 2, Minecraft, and Lilo & Stitch Dominate the Box Office

Avatar: Fire and Ash is doing what these movies always do worldwide: selling tickets like crazy. In the U.S., though, the vibe is a little more muted. The numbers back that up, and they tell a pretty interesting story.

The scorecard right now

• Domestic box office: $397 million, sitting at #4 for 2025 behind Zootopia 2 ($420.6 million), Lilo & Stitch ($423.8 million), and A Minecraft Movie ($424 million). Fire and Ash needs another $20+ million to crack the top three.
• Global box office: only trailing Zootopia 2 at $1.8 billion and Ne Zha 2 at $2 billion.
• Studio picture: Disney has three of the top four domestic earners this year, and its recent strategy leans hard into international appeal, so this performance is very much in the comfort zone.

So... are Avatar 4 and 5 actually happening?

Right now, yes. Avatar 4 is dated for December 2029 and Avatar 5 is set for December 2031. Confidence has clearly been high for a while. The last two films, The Way of Water and Fire and Ash, were shot back-to-back, which helped them arrive faster. The plan for the next two looks similar: likely filmed together if they move forward.

James Cameron has also been refreshingly blunt about how far he is willing to go if the math stops working.

"I have no doubt in my mind that this movie will make money. The question is, does it make enough money to justify doing it again?"

Handing the keys to someone else? Possible in a limited way. As Cameron put it:

"There are levels in which I [can] immerse. I don't think there'd ever be a version where there's another Avatar movie that I didn't produce closely. But, in terms of it taking over my life, that's a threshold issue for me."

Why the domestic ceiling feels a little lower

Some folks argue Avatar doesn't loom large in pop-culture chatter, and you can kind of see where they are coming from when you look at the U.S. totals. 2025 has been a sequel pile-up: three new MCU movies, plus fresh entries in Jurassic World and Mission: Impossible. By the time Fire and Ash hit in December, audience fatigue had set in. Meanwhile, animated titles like Lilo & Stitch and Zootopia 2 felt fresher and ate up a lot of family dollars.

Where the franchise stands among the heavyweights

Even with only three movies, Avatar has muscled into the top ten all-time franchise totals. The wild stat is the per-film average: roughly $2.2 billion. The only thing close on a per-movie basis is the Avengers corner of the MCU, but once you factor in the entire Marvel slate, that average drops. And with new Spider-Man, Star Wars, Avengers, and DC titles rolling out this year, those mega-franchises will keep padding their overall leads on total grosses.

What Fire and Ash actually is

If you somehow missed the marketing: Fire and Ash continues the Pandora saga, with Jake Sully and Neytiri facing the Ash People, led by Varang. The movie splits its time between an external war and the internal fallout of personal loss, with the family fighting to protect their own and Pandora's future. Big-scale sci-fi, elemental tribes, and plenty of Cameron-scale spectacle.

Bottom line: global sensation, domestic fourth place, and a studio that is just fine with how this one is playing. The only real suspense now is whether the final tally clears the bar Cameron has in his head for pushing the big blue saga into its next chapter.