Look out, Neytiri, you’ve got some competition in the form of a yellow talking sponge that lives under the sea and wears pants that are quite square in shape. At least that’s what Rotten Tomatoes indicates, with the site showing Avatar: Fire and Ash performing worse with critics than a bunch of films that might surprise you.
Releasing December 19 nationwide, Avatar: Fire and Ash continues the story of those blue cat alien people on that planet that looks like the coolest Unreal Engine 5 demo you’ve ever seen. This time, however, there are other alien cat people who aren’t all chill and into nature. These wild ones are into fire and destruction, and are causing chaos in the third entry in the blockbuster series. But perhaps more chaotic than that is the fact that Avatar: Fire and Ash is sitting at 68 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with 187 reviews, a drop compared to past installments. The first Avatar in 2009 sits at 81 percent and its 2022 sequel, Way of Water, has a solid 76 percent. I wonder if the lack of a big gap between releases and the tech not seeming as wild in this latest film has hurt perceptions of it.
Here are some recent films that have higher Rotten Tomatoes scores. And yeah, RT is just an aggregation site and shouldn’t be treated as the gospel, but a lower score might throw a wrench in the works for the third Avatar movie, hurting its chances of making the billions the past films have, though I fully expect it to still do gangbusters over the weekend.
- Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair – 100%
- The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants – 91%
- Zootopia 2 – 91%
- Thunderbolts – 88%
- Bad Guys 2 -87%
- Predator Badlands – 86%
- Superman – 83%
- Dog Man – 82%
- Ballerina: From the World of John Wick – 75%
- Black Phone 2 – 72%
- Lilo + Stitch – 72%
So yeah, the latest Avatar movie is losing critically to the newest SpongeBob movie. Perhaps movie critics just love that new tie-in song from Ice Spice, “Big Guy.”
Or perhaps SpongeBob truly is the big guy, and indeed, when compared to Cameron and his blue cat people, his pants are okay. But hey, at least Cameron can take solace in the fact that Avatar 3 is better than Wicked: For Good. Oh, and the fact that this new Avatar installment is likely to be the biggest movie of the year, like the past films were in 2009 and 2022.
