Just days before the holiday season, Avatar: From Fire and Ashes, the third installment in James Cameron's global saga, arrives in French cinemas on December 17th. Highly anticipated, the film is seen as a possible remedy to a catastrophic 2025 for French cinemas, whose attendance is projected to drop by 15% compared to 2024, according to figures reported by RTL.
An industry in crisis that is gambling its end-of-year success on a blockbuster.
In 2025, cinema attendance will be at its lowest point in over two decades. Fewer than 155 million tickets are expected to be sold by the end of the year, far from the 180 million deemed necessary to reach an “acceptable” level, and light-years away from the 200 million seen before the Covid pandemic. This trend has only been exacerbated by the failure of numerous highly anticipated sequels: Les Tuche 5, Kaamelott 2, and Mission Impossible 7 all struggled to find an audience, despite their commercial potential.
In this context, Avatar 3 arrives as a potential savior. The first two installments each drew approximately 14 million viewers in France, with explosive openings of over 5 million admissions in two weeks. If its success continues, the film could transform a dismal year into a more respectable ending. Especially since Zootopia 2, another major December release, is already starting to gain traction.
But as Martial You points out on RTL, this upturn shouldn't mask the structural problem: "Avatar 3 mustn't sow the seeds of French cinema's decline," he warns. Because beyond the success of a single blockbuster, the entire ecosystem is threatened, particularly the funding of local cinemas, largely fueled by a tax on every ticket sold in theaters. This is a system to which neither streaming platforms nor private television channels contribute.
Between technical prowess and human emotion: the Cameron recipe
While financial expectations are high, Avatar: Of Fire and Ashes is also banking on its technical innovations to once again appeal to a wide audience. Approximately 40% of the film was shot in HFR (High Frame Rate), a 48 frames-per-second technology intended to smooth out action and flight scenes, often criticized for its overly "television-like" look. James Cameron fully stands by this choice, telling the website Discussing Film that "HFR is an artistic tool" and that it "solves 3D perception problems."
But the director insists: Avatar's true strength lies in its characters. “What resonates with viewers is the story of people searching for their place in the world,” Sam Worthington, who plays the hero Jake Sully, told 20 Minutes in an interview. Alongside him, Stephen Lang reprises his role as Colonel Quaritch, a complex antagonist whose performance, captured using the now-famous “performance capture” technique, retains all its emotional nuances despite the layers of digital effects.
This technology, which has become Cameron's trademark, allows actors to express themselves in more serene and collaborative conditions. Worthington describes a "very calm" set, conducive to creativity, where each take can be used freely, regardless of the shot size chosen in the edit.
More than just a visual spectacle, Avatar 3 also aims to be an intimate, familial, and political drama, in keeping with the previous installments. It remains to be seen whether this will be enough to keep French audiences coming back to theaters for a long time, beyond just the thrill of Pandora.
