Today on Disney+, the film that, despite exceeding one billion at the box office, has left the continuity of its franchise up in the air

‘Avatar: Fire and Ashes’the third installment of James Cameron’s billion-dollar saga, lands in Disney+. A film that opens with a statement against AI, introduces the franchise’s first major Na’vi villain, and leaves the future of two sequels in the airsequels that, despite the extraordinary collections of the franchise’s films, are still not guaranteed to survive.

The film picks up where ‘The Way of Water’ left off: the Sullys, grieving the death of their eldest son Neteyam, try to protect another family member while facing two simultaneous threats. The RDA returns with reinforcements and the Mangkwan, known as the People of Ash, also appear: a volcanic Na’vi clan that has renounced the spiritual entity that underpins the entire cosmology of Pandora. It is the first time in the franchise that the Na’vi occupy the role of antagonists, which breaks the moral structure of the first two films: until now, only humans were the aggressors.

The film’s visual effects were carried out by Wētā FX, the New Zealand studio that was linked to Peter Jackson. The team signed 3,132 visual effects shotsand the rendering process accumulated 1.248 million computing hours. One of the key technical innovations for the film was Kora, a set of tools for chemical combustion simulations, developed to solve a problem they had already identified in ‘The Way of Water’: photorealistic fire was extraordinarily difficult for artists to handle. Kora makes creating these types of images remarkably easy.

In its opening weekend, the film grossed $347 million worldwide, and has already grossed $1,490. It is Cameron’s fourth film to exceed one billion, after ‘Avatar’, ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ and ‘Titanic’. The three films in the saga total more than $6 billion at the global box office, making it the first trilogy in history to reach that figure. However, calculations say that Disney needed to exceed one billion to make a profit, and that figure is increasingly being exceeded more closely. Without a doubt, an obstacle in the way of an ambitious story that may not tell everything that Cameron has in his portfolio.

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