Will ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ bring people back to the cinema?
Last week, I was invited to the advanced screening of “Avatar: Fire and Ash” at the IMAX cinema in the SM Mall of Asia. It’s another large-scale, cinematic epic by James Cameron that truly immerses you in the world of Pandora and the characters he created back in 2009 when the first movie broke global box office records.
It is what people call an “event film,” one that is sure to bring people to the movie theater to see the groundbreaking work Cameron does in cinema technology to make his science fiction worlds come to life.
While the film franchise is up there in the most expensive films to make, they also almost always make bank, with the first film seeing a worldwide earnings of $2.9 billion on an estimated budget of $273 million (according to Box Office Mojo). The sequel is ranked the third highest-grossing movie ever (right behind “Avatar” which is right behind “Avengers: End Game”) at around $2.3 billion.
But even Cameron isn’t sure that “Avatar: Fire and Ash” will be able to earn enough to justify the planned fourth and fifth installments of his series. In “The Town with Matthew Belloni” podcast, he cited that the post-pandemic audiences have not been rushing to fill cinema seats, with streaming habits being one of the given reasons.
He did say he was sure it would be profitable, but is it profitable enough to justify the sequels?
A look at the cinematic experience
The post-pandemic cinematic landscape has been quite a struggle for movies. There have been box office giants in the post-pandemic era with “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” coming to mind, and “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Jurassic World: Dominion,” and “The Super Mario Brothers Movie” having also made over a billion for their studios.
But a lot of other films have been struggling along the way. Other big tent poles, like most superhero movies, have underperformed post-pandemic. According to an article by Ryan Scott in Slash Film, the 2025 box office for films has exceeded last year’s numbers by $3 billion at $33.5 billion, but the total number pales to 2019’s $39.4 billion.
That’s because a lot of people are not watching movies in the cinema.
Worldwide, the problem is the same: a failing economy, which means high ticket prices (along with every other cost going up), and a large selection of films available on streaming platforms, which means that if you’re patient, the film will eventually go up on the marquee, give or take a few months. A lot of homes have large screen television sets and a good sound system. The underprivileged can watch movies from their phones. Not an ideal way, but it is certainly cheaper than going to the cinema.
Movies and the movie industry have been trying to amplify the movie theater experience with technological innovations for decades. 3D and, later, 4D (which I hate), were used to combat the home theater system that boomed in the ’90s. Later on, they upgraded the sound system to Dolby and Dolby Atmos. Then IMAX screens and now, IMAX 4DX. They’ve made Director’s Club theaters with LazyBoy chairs, Tempur beds, and unlimited popcorn. Anything and everything to make the cinematic experience in the cinema unrivaled by whatever you can do at home.
And there’s no other way to watch Cameron’s Avatar series, much less “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” than at an IMAX 3D movie house. It’s another epic, totally immersive dive into this alien world, both underwater and in the air. It’s not a very strong script, and in fact, it plays out very similarly to the second film, but the stunning visuals, the hard-hitting action, and exotic creatures as imagined by a master filmmaker are still something to behold.
It’s larger than life, and it really fires up the synapses that one comes out talking about particular scenes—or, like my friend and I, passionately trashing the writing, but praising some of the key visuals and the performances.
The magic of cinema
People who argue that there’s no need to watch a film at the cinema when they can watch it more comfortably at home are indicative of a detachment from what makes the cinematic experience so wonderful.
Unless you have a projector and lighting up a whole empty wall in your living space, a large screen TV does not have the same power that the size of a cinema screen has in making stories feel big and universal. A romantic comedy or a drama is further amplified when you see these characters projected 40 feet wide and 20 feet high. After all, some nuances and textures get lost in a smaller screen.
At the advanced screenings of any Disney-produced movie, we are asked to deposit our gadgets outside before entering the cinema—for anti-piracy reasons. What it does is ensure that the audience is completely focused on the movie. No one picks up their phones to look at a text or Google someone’s name. No light bothers other viewers or anyone answering a call; activities I notice when watching at a regular cinema.
This is another power that movies have when seen together. It is the power of community; of the communal experience. No matter how weak I felt the writing was, I gasped at some of the new creatures that Cameron shows us in “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” During a detailed, complex fight scene later into the film, one of the villains gets their comeuppance and the whole crowd erupts into cheers that even I find myself cheering along. There’s a buzz and energy that’s present, that shoots out from person to person in a cinema of people completely engaged with the material.
And then, when everyone is exiting the theater, you can hear the buzz of people talking about their favorite scenes or what they didn’t like about it. This is what is lost post-pandemic. Instead, people are taking out their cellphones and checking their messages, checking their socials. Others are looking up Letterboxd or typing away on their own. No one is engaging with the person they watched the movie with. Immediately, their experience is cut short.
What threatens cinema
The biggest enemy of cinema is our own easily distracted selves. How many films have I seen in the cinema where someone is answering a phone call, someone is texting, or checking their socials during an exposition scene?
I’ve heard people call films boring, but that’s because they have one foot in the movie theater and the other somewhere on the internet.
The whole space of a cinema is meant to cut you off from the world for the duration of the film so that you can open yourself up to a brand new story. But we don’t want to do that anymore. We treat the cinema (and even theatrical spaces) as if we were in our living rooms. We reject characters and storylines we can’t relate to—which is funny to me, because the whole idea of fiction is to show us new perspectives and new points-of-view. Since when were we so scared to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes?
That said, for cinemas to get full again, we have to become more empathetic and learn to dive in.
