The series’ primary villain also returns: Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), now wholly comfortable as a 9-foot-tall avatar embedded with his human memories. His hatred for Jake remains paramount, still stung by his perception that the former young Marine betrayed him — and Earth — by fully embracing his Na’vi identity on Pandora.
Their prickly dynamic is compounded further by Spider (Jake Champion) — a human child orphaned by earlier events, and now embraced by Jake and his Na’vi family — because Quaritch has learned that Spider actually is his son. But the boy, in turn, wants absolutely nothing to do with his malevolent birth father.
A new villain emerges in this film: Varang (Oona Chaplin), the terrifying leader of Pandora’s splinter Mangkwan Clan, also known as the Ash People. They’ve forsaken Pandora’s mystical presence — Eywa, the planet’s “All Mother” — in favor of setting up their own violent, fire-based culture. Varang has, to borrow a note from another fantasy series, succumbed to the dark side of The Force.
Additional new characters include Capt. Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell), a weathered marine big-game hunter hired by RDA to kill as many tulkun as possible; and Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), an RDA corporate weasel who values the bottom line over trivialities such as ethical and moral considerations.
As a further indication of the way Cameron continues to strip-mine his own previous efforts, Selfridge is a veritable clone of the character played by Paul Reiser back in 1986’s “Aliens.”
Disney/20th Century/Lightstorm's "Avatar: Fire and Ash" is leading what has been a fruitful pre-Christmas weekend at the box office, leading the charts with an $88 million domestic opening and $345 million worldwide.
While that's well short of the $134 million domestic/$434.5 million global opening of "Avatar: The Way of Water" in 2022 and likely rules out "Avatar" becoming the first franchise ever with three $2 billion installments, this launch should be enough to make "Fire and Ash" the highest grossing Hollywood film of the year, albeit second to the $2 billion Chinese animated film "Ne Zha 2."
That's because "Avatar 3" is expected to take advantage of the holidays to leg out well past the rest of this year's offerings. With premium format screenings expected to be filled up over the next two weeks and the historically slower Christmas Eve falling on a Wednesday this year, "Fire and Ash" should leg out to at least $400 million domestic and $1.6 billion worldwide.
Their prickly dynamic is compounded further by Spider (Jake Champion) — a human child orphaned by earlier events, and now embraced by Jake and his Na’vi family — because Quaritch has learned that Spider actually is his son. But the boy, in turn, wants absolutely nothing to do with his malevolent birth father.
A new villain emerges in this film: Varang (Oona Chaplin), the terrifying leader of Pandora’s splinter Mangkwan Clan, also known as the Ash People. They’ve forsaken Pandora’s mystical presence — Eywa, the planet’s “All Mother” — in favor of setting up their own violent, fire-based culture. Varang has, to borrow a note from another fantasy series, succumbed to the dark side of The Force.
Additional new characters include Capt. Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell), a weathered marine big-game hunter hired by RDA to kill as many tulkun as possible; and Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), an RDA corporate weasel who values the bottom line over trivialities such as ethical and moral considerations.
As a further indication of the way Cameron continues to strip-mine his own previous efforts, Selfridge is a veritable clone of the character played by Paul Reiser back in 1986’s “Aliens.”
Disney/20th Century/Lightstorm's "Avatar: Fire and Ash" is leading what has been a fruitful pre-Christmas weekend at the box office, leading the charts with an $88 million domestic opening and $345 million worldwide.
While that's well short of the $134 million domestic/$434.5 million global opening of "Avatar: The Way of Water" in 2022 and likely rules out "Avatar" becoming the first franchise ever with three $2 billion installments, this launch should be enough to make "Fire and Ash" the highest grossing Hollywood film of the year, albeit second to the $2 billion Chinese animated film "Ne Zha 2."
That's because "Avatar 3" is expected to take advantage of the holidays to leg out well past the rest of this year's offerings. With premium format screenings expected to be filled up over the next two weeks and the historically slower Christmas Eve falling on a Wednesday this year, "Fire and Ash" should leg out to at least $400 million domestic and $1.6 billion worldwide.
