Another week, another impressive addition to Avatar: Fire and Ash‘s already powerful box-office totals. James Cameron is no stranger to delivering spectacular cinema, whether that be in Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Titanic, or all three Avatar films, but his isn’t the only name intrinsically linked to blockbusters. In fact, Cameron’s big-screen legacy was made all the more possible thanks to Steven Spielberg, with his movie Jaws in 1975 even helping cement the notion of a “blockbuster.” (You see, back in 1975, you couldn’t use your iPhone to order tickets ahead of time, resulting in lines forming around a movie theater’s entire block.)
This past weekend’s box-office totals have taken Fire and Ash to $401.3 million domestically, which contributes to its $1.5 billion worldwide. These domestic totals push the third Avatar film past Jurassic Park‘s original box-office run of $357.1 million. In the 30+ years since the original release of Jurassic Park, its official domestic total is $407.2 million, and with Fire and Ash earning roughly $4 million this past week, we won’t be surprised if the sequel surpasses that total in the near future.
As far as how the legacy of the Avatar franchise vs. the legacy of the Jurassic Park franchise compares, it’s a complicated story, though both franchises have cemented their places in the annals of cinema for the ways their CGI has revolutionized storytelling.
The Battle Between Box-Office Behemoths
In addition to passing the original run of Jurassic Park and sneaking up on its re-release totals, Avatar: Fire and Ash has overcome five of the seven Jurassic movies and their original domestic releases so far. The threequel’s domestic total has also put it past The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III, Jurassic World Dominion, and Jurassic World: Rebirth, while Fire and Ash‘s worldwide total puts it ahead of almost every installment in the Jurassic franchise, with only 2015’s Jurassic World overshadowing it.
With three installments under its belt, the Avatar franchise’s $6.7 billion worldwide total isn’t too far off from the Jurassic franchise’s $6.9 billion, though the significant difference is Cameron’s series has scored this total with only three films compared to Jurassic‘s seven. When pitting the filmmakers against one another, regardless of the genre or franchise, Cameron-directed films have taken in just over $10 billion with a dozen films, while Spielberg has scored roughly $10.7 billion with nearly 30 movies.
Could This Be the Summer of Spielberg?
In addition to Jaws and Jurassic Park, Spielberg has delivered summer spectacles like Raiders of the Lost Ark (and multiple Indiana Jones sequels), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, A.I., War of the Worlds, Minority Report, and Saving Private Ryan. The filmmaker was regularly a staple of summer movies, though he’s focused more on human-centered stories over epics for more than a decade. Since 2011’s War Horse, we’ve been given movies like The Post, The Fabelmans, Lincoln, and Bridge of Spies, with the closest he’s gotten to a spectacle being 2018’s Ready Player One.
That all could change this summer, though, as he’s unleashing Disclosure Day, a title that was long referred to as “Steven Spielberg UFO Movie.” Early glimpses at the movie tease alien encounters more akin to Close Encounters of the Third Kind than War of the Worlds, though given how much secrecy has surrounded the project, the upcoming experience could deliver something nobody was expecting and the filmmaker could regain his crown as the king of summer blockbusters.
James Cameron, on the other hand, seems to be trapped on Pandora indefinitely.
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