“Avatar 3”: best start of the year with more than 270,000 entries for its first day

We felt it coming on Wednesday morning, when the new opus of “Avatar” recorded a fantastic score at 8 a.m. in Paris during its very first screening in the world, at the UGC Ciné Cité des Halles cinema. Confirmation: on its first day of operation in France, “Of Fire and Ashes” accumulated 273,370 admissions on 728 prints, thus giving itself the best start of the year, until then held (with 260,176 spectators) by another film distributed by Disney, the live image version of “Lilo & Stitch” released on May 21.

It therefore starts very strongly for James Cameron and the third part of his saga, a situation to which the filmmaker is accustomed, since this is the case with each release of the films of the franchise in France – it is not for nothing that he insisted that the 3h17 feature film begin its career as a first exclusive in our country, two days before its launch in the United States.

“Zootopia 2” passes the 4 million admissions mark

The other new releases from December 17 necessarily recorded scores below and without any measure, even if some are doing well in this context, such as “The Song of the Forests” by Vincent Munier which attracted 42,585 fans (previews included), placing itself in third position at the box office of the day. The second is a film which continues on its merry way, still distributed by Disney: “Zootopia 2”, which has passed the 4 million admissions mark since its release.

As for the new “Avatar”, this impressive score on Wednesday turns out to be higher than that of the second part, “The Way of Water”, which it is true was launched in December 2022, the day of the France-Morocco football World Cup semi-final. The very first original opus, “Avatar”, was a record hit for its first day with 330,934 spectators in December 2009.

The future of the last two parts depends on the box office

It now remains for this excellent start to be confirmed in the coming weeks, to be able to flirt, at the end of production, with the astronomical cumulative totals of the first two parts: 14.6 million for “Avatar” and 14 million all round for “The Way of Water”.

And, in terms of global box office, “Avatar” still holds a record since 1939 with $4 billion in revenue. To be followed closely, therefore, because it would bode well for James Cameron if “Of Fire and Ashes” reaches, in France, the mark of 10 million admissions and proportionally equivalent scores internationally, so that he can be assured of being able to successfully complete the production of the final two parts of the saga, planned for 2029 and 2031.