Avatar: Fire And Ash Box Office (Photo Credit – Instagram)
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Celebrated filmmaker James Cameron’s epic sci-fi saga Avatar has delivered two of the biggest box office phenomena in cinema history. Avatar (2009) remains the highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, while its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, currently ranks third in top lifetime grossers, trailing only Avengers: Endgame, as per Box Office Mojo. Naturally, expectations for the franchise’s next chapter, Avatar: Fire and Ash, are sky-high.
Early reactions suggest that Avatar: Fire and Ash has all the ingredients of a full-blown blockbuster. Still, the global box office is never entirely predictable, even for a proven franchise like Avatar. This raises an important question: how much does Avatar: Fire and Ash need to earn worldwide to outperform the earnings-to-budget performance of the first two films? Let’s break down the numbers.
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Avatar & Avatar: The Way of Water – Earnings & Budgets
Here’s how the first two Avatar films performed at the global box office relative to their estimated production budgets:
Avatar (2009)
Worldwide Earnings: $2.92 billion
Production Budget: $237 million
This puts Avatar’s earnings-to-budget ratio at approximately 12.32x, making it one of the most profitable big-budget films ever made.
Depending on the final production cost, The Way of Water delivered an earnings-to-budget ratio in the range of approximately 5.09x (at $460 million) to 6.69x (at $350 million).
The Box Office Target For Avatar: Fire And Ash
According to Variety, Avatar: Fire and Ash carries a reported production budget of around $400 million. Using the earnings-to-budget benchmarks set by its predecessors:
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To outperform the original Avatar, the third film would need to gross approximately $4.93 billion worldwide
To match The Way of Water in earnings-to-budget efficiency, Fire and Ash must earn between $2.04 billion and $2.68 billion globally, depending on Avatar 2’s final budget figure.
To summarize, outperforming the first Avatar’s earnings-to-budget performance would require an unprecedented box office performance, but surpassing The Way of Water’s earnings-to-budget ratio remains a far more realistic and attainable target for Avatar: Fire and Ash. Let’s see how close the upcoming installment can get to these numbers.
