In under a week of release in theaters worldwide, director James Cameron‘s Avatar: Fire and Ash has passed its first major box office milestone. Avatar 3 can’t be held to regular standards; passing the $100 million milestone — a coveted accomplishment for other films — is meaningless for something as expensive as Cameron‘s new film. The film arrived in theaters worldwide only three years after its predecessor, Avatar: The Way of Water — for Cameron, this was a lightning-fast turnaround, considering the decade-plus that it took for Avatar 2 to cross the finish line. Like the last time, there was skepticism in the air about the franchise’s cultural value, and even now, the jury’s still out on whether Avatar 3 will match the success of its predecessors. But with encouraging forecasts for its second weekend of release, the movie can celebrate its latest accomplishment.

Avatar 3 has now passed the $400 million mark at the global box office, which means that it has recovered the reported $400 million that was spent on it. Of course, the movie would probably need to gross around $1 billion just to break even — movies of this size need to generate twice their budgets to start turning a profit — but that shouldn’t be too far away. Avatar movies don’t perform like others, even by the unusual standards of this time of the year. For instance, Avatar 2 opened with $134 million domestically and grossed nearly $700 million by the end of its run. More remarkably, the first Avatar grossed under $80 million in its domestic debut, and ultimately crossed the $700 million mark. It’s the highest-grossing film in global box office history, with nearly $3 billion in the bank. Avatar 2 is the third-biggest movie of all time, with $2.3 billion at the global box office.

‘Avatar 3’ Might Be the End of the Franchise

What this means is that the bar for success is really high for Avatar 3, which has earned the worst reviews of the trilogy, but also some of the best audience response. It’s currently sitting at a 66% critics’ score and a 91% audience score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus reads, “Remaining on the cutting edge of visual effects, Fire and Ash repeats the narrative beats of its predecessors to frustrating effect, but its grand spectacle continues to stoke one-of-a-kind thrills.” Cameron has suggested that he might be done with the franchise, pointing to the changes in the theatrical market and shifting audience tastes, but he originally had at least two more follow-ups planned.

via Collider