If Nobody Loves ‘Avatar’ Then Why Does Everyone Love ‘Avatar?’

Avatar: Fire & Ash is making a lot of money. As of the writing of this piece, the third instalment in James Cameron’s sci-fi saga has earned over $794.1 million in its two weeks of worldwide release. It’s easily going to be one of the biggest films of 2025, although the industry seems skeptical that it’ll pass $2 billion like its predecessors. That’s led some to describe the film as a ‘flop’ in terms of budget-to-gross ratio, but that’s more a problem of the film industry’s nonsense than anything to do with the movie. Betting against the notion of Cameron making more money than you is a foolish endeavour.

With Fire & Ash has come another round of everyone’s favourite pop culture chat: does anyone actually like these movies? We hear the same conversation year after year with the Avatar franchise. It has no cultural footprint. It has no devoted fans. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to have fans, full stop. It’s nobody’s favourite movie or series. Who loves it? Do you know anyone who is excited for more of these? We’ve been talking like this since 2009, and little has changed about the discourse. But surely the fact that these films keep making so much money - more money than any other film, not adjusting for inflation - refutes this rhetoric? How can it be that everyone in the world goes to watch these films that nobody wants or likes?

The ‘cultural footprint’ conversation is a trap I’ve fallen into many times before. There is a point to it, because it is unusual that the highest-grossing film of all time isn’t obsessed over by devoted fan spaces in the way that similar sci-fi blockbusters are. It does have a bigger fanfiction presence than it gets credit for - over 7,000 fics on AO3 is nothing to sneeze at - but it does pale in comparison to its spacey brethren. Still, in this current era of cultural oversaturation, where we’re more spoiled than ever with choice across medium, platform, and location, Avatar does feel like the shrinking violet next to stuff like Marvel, Disney animation, and whatever your eight-year-old nephew is currently obsessed with.

But surely the money is the footprint? Earning that level of eye-watering cash will make an impact. These films will always be pointed to as mega-successes beyond anything else in the medium for a reason. Avatar: Endgame overtook Avatar and the Na’vi came back and smacked those superheroes down! Maybe its status as an industry changer is simply less impactful to average audiences than the memes that take over our phones on a daily basis. Speaking of industry impact, Avatar has undeniably moved the needle on VFX in Hollywood. We may have grown used to wall-to-wall CGI, and jaded by some of the jankier moments, but Avatar’s effects remain stellar. Indeed, they seem to have only improved while Cameron’s competition suffers. Overworked and underpaid FX teams have been forced into impossible deadlines and it shows in the final result. With Avatar, you don’t just see the money and the effort; you see the time it took.

While these films are decidedly not for me, there is something appealing about this notion of an Avatar movie turning up, doing its thing, then going away. We don’t have to spend the years in between releases being bombarded with related IP and endless merchandising. Publications don’t clog up our feeds with clickbaity speculation about spoilers. You don’t need to watch 16 other films and TV shows to keep up with the continuity or mythos. My social media feed isn’t full of stans getting into weird fights over box office grosses and Letterboxd averages.

These movies just serve us as pieces of entertainment we can engage with and then move on. That sounds so ridiculously simple, right? And yet it’s no longer the norm, at least not as demanded by the entertainment industry and corporate stranglehold that has made it an endless nightmare for creators and fans alike. Maybe there are people out there who dream of living on Pandora, but overall, Avatar is best enjoyed as a lone island in the ocean: a quick and pleasant visit then you move on to newer pastures.

The current era of pop culture is one that requires more work from audiences than ever, and we are tired. If there’s a show you’re excited for on a streaming service, you’re keenly aware that you have to watch it all as soon as possible and maybe even rewatch it in that period because these corporate giants only care about early viewership numbers and they cancel things too quickly. Fans are encouraged to commit barely-veiled streaming fraud on Spotify to get their singer’s songs further up the charts. The internet is full of people pushing us to ‘optimise’ our free time, to read books quicker and listen to podcasts at 1.5 speed and turn your hobbies into side-hustles. It feels as though nothing is allowed to just be itself, to serve us as entertainment and nothing more. I doubt Cameron wanted Avatar, his grand and hugely pricy passion project, to be seen as such, but it’s a welcome purpose to serve.

While promoting Fire & Ash, Cameron has been cagey in discussing further sequels. His initial plan was a quintet of Pandora tales, but he recently told Entertainment Weekly that it’s not set in stone at Disney, and if he doesn’t get to make parts four and five, he’ll host a press conference to discuss what would have happened in those movies. With the current box office numbers holding strong, it would be unexpected for Disney to pull the plug on the Na’vi but not the shock of the century. Still, with each movie, we keep seeing people disprove the ethos that nobody likes this franchise or cares about it as a piece of cultural ephemera. As always, betting against James Cameron is inadvisable.