SO MUCH FOR A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES:

Avatar: Fire and Ash is another box office disappointment for Disney, which had hoped the film would provide a short-term boost. The previous sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, opened to more than $134 million domestically in 2022 and went on to earn nearly $685 million in the U.S., while Fire and Ash debuted with just $89 million. Adjusted for inflation, the decline is even more pronounced, signaling a sharp drop in audience interest and raising doubts about the franchise’s once-reliable box office pull. I stopped caring about the franchise after the original film.

To be fair, audiences don’t help. We get tired of endless sequels and remakes and see them as a sign of Hollywood laziness, yet we aren’t exactly rushing to theaters for new IPs anymore. The problem is that, between ticket and snack costs, a night out at the theater is far more expensive than it used to be. Given the high cost of a night at the theater, people are more than willing to wait for movies to become available on streaming services or DVD. This is where Hollywood is cannibalizing its own box office profits.

These days, movies hit streaming so quickly that audiences don’t think the wait is too much to bear for a film they want to see. When I was a kid, it felt like movies wouldn’t be available on home video for at least six months after they left theaters, giving us far more incentive to go to the theater to see the movies we wanted. Hollywood hasn’t figured out how to make moviegoing relevant again, and if it doesn’t, theaters will be a thing of the past.

In a way, they already are, sadly:

History will record that COVID killed the movie as we had understood it. The trend line of shrinking audience was already there, but the whole industry was ballasted in the 2010s by the blockbuster success of two kinds of films–animated movies and superhero movies.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 5, 2025

Related: The Strange Case of Avatar and Its Missing Cultural Footprint.