Avatar: Fire and Ash early trailer reactions brand it 'best film of the year'
Avatar 3 isn't scheduled to arrive in cinemas until December, but the filmmaker is ready to create some early buzz for the next instalment in his epic big-budget sci-fi franchise.
'As stunning as anyone is anticipating,' tweeted film critic Austin Burke, who also noted that 'the visuals are (somehow) on another level'.
'There is no doubt in my mind that this WILL be the biggest movie of 2025, and epic doesn't feel like it does this trailer justice…'
Meanwhile, @TheOscarRace simply announced, 'It's going to be the best film of the year', while ScreenRant's @LiamTCrowley admitted he was 'breathless'.
'What a privilege it is to be alive during this revolutionary franchise,' he added.
'It looks so damn good. Even more fantastical world building on display. The Ash People look menacing and have intriguing environmental designs,' shared Rendy Jones, adding: 'The story feels grander and more intense than Way of Water.'
Shot back-to-back with 2022's Avatar: The Way of Water, Fire and Ash sees the return of a sprawling cast including Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet, Stephen Lang, Jack Champion, Bailey Bass and Britain Dalton, plus new additions Oona Chaplin, Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis.
Secretly screened exclusively for journalists and tastemakers by Disney earlier this week, the first look at Avatar: Fire and Ash will be released online on Monday July 28 – or available to watch ahead of Marvel's The Fantastic Four: First Steps when it hits cinemas on Friday.
'A visually astounding promise of another thrilling return to Pandora. Breathtaking cinematography, powerful action, and a euphoric musical score,' praised Jonathan Sim. '3D has never looked this good.'
I have seen the trailer for #AVATAR Fire and Ash, and it is as stunning as anyone is anticipating. James Cameron once again looks to be unleashing a powerful story that will resonate, and the visuals are (somehow) on another level. There is no doubt in my mind that this WILL be… pic.twitter.com/Gp2zR2U5ky — Austin Burke (@theBurk3nator) July 21, 2025
I just EXPERIENCED the #AvatarFireAndAsh trailer in glorious 3D. I'm breathless. Visuals expectedly surreal but man is the Ash People's landscape something to behold. Pandora Civil War loading. What a privilege it is to be alive during this revolutionary franchise. @screenrant pic.twitter.com/4Xyfa5vJ5E — Liam (@LiamTCrowley) July 21, 2025
Had a sneak peek at the AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH trailer last night (in 3D) – and James Cameron has me convinced all over again. Phenomenal. Tremendous visuals, new antagonist Varang may become my next obsession. Nothing convinced me #Avatar 3 won't be bigger and better than the last pic.twitter.com/JZn3SG13xY — Tori Brazier (@dinotaur) July 23, 2025
Saw the #AvatarFireandAsh trailer in 3D. It looks so damn good. Even more fantastical world building on display. The Ash People look menacing and have intriguing environmental designs. The story feels grander and more intense than WAY OF WATER. Quaritch v. Sully rematch tease! pic.twitter.com/EarkYREOih — Rendy Jones (@rendy_jones) July 21, 2025
#AvatarFireAndAsh trailer is MARVELOUS.A visually astounding promise of another thrilling return to Pandora. Breathtaking cinematography, powerful action, and a euphoric musical score.Dark and delightful. 3D has never looked this good. pic.twitter.com/4aaT5nQ1KH — Jonathan Sim (@TheJonathanSim) July 21, 2025
'With the #AvatarFireAndAsh trailer, James Cameron pushes the potential of 3D beyond the realms of what we've seen before, even from him and teases a beautifully vibrant, action-packed and illustrious visual odyssey in the Avatar saga,' enthused @TomMCJL.
'Nobody is touching Cameron visually. The next Avatar looks amazing,' posted Kit Stone.
Others had exciting comparisons for the film on the strength of the first trailer alone.
'It's insane we're getting Last of the Mohicans meets like Empire Strikes Back!' suggested @MOVIEDEATHS. 'Giant action set pieces somehow the visuals look even better than Way of Water [sic].'
Avatar: Fire And Ash sees Jake (Worthington) and Neytiri's (Saldaña) family grappling with grief in the wake of the death of son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) as conflict between the RDA and the Pandorans escalates after the Na'vi and Metikayina clan's hard-won victory at the end of Avatar: The Way of Water.
Call me Ash cuz that trailer was Fire 🔥. Those 3D glasses made me feel like I was in Pandora, almost too close. Nobody is touching Cameron visually. The next Avatar looks amazing. And I have no idea what it's about. Perfect trailer. Give us nothing, Jim! #AvatarFireAndAsh pic.twitter.com/9LiD7UT0gX — Kit Stone (@bykitstone) July 22, 2025
With the #AvatarFireAndAsh trailer, James Cameron pushes the potential of 3D beyond the realms of what we've seen before, even from him & teases a beautifully vibrant, action-packed & illustrious visual odyssey in the Avatar Saga.Our glimpse into the family driven story… pic.twitter.com/Twi0IKTHub — TomMCJL ✨ (@TomMCJL) July 22, 2025
Just saw the AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH trailer in 3D on the big screen, and it looks like James Cameron's third chapter in this epic saga is set to deliver once again! The trailer leans heavily on the stunning visuals, giving us glimpses of the new volcanic environments on Pandora &… pic.twitter.com/mVuYTgEZA0 — Matt Neglia (@NextBestPicture) July 21, 2025
The newly-introduced Ash People also promise to bring more conflict, thanks to their aggressive and fiery leader Varang (Chaplin); Cameron first teased them in January 2023, saying that he was featuring 'different cultures from those I have already shown' and that he plans 'to show the Na'vi from another angle because, so far, I have only shown their good sides'.
'In the early films, there are very negative human examples and very positive Na'vi examples. In Avatar 3 we will do the opposite. We will also explore new worlds, while continuing the story of the main characters,' he explained to French publication 20 Minutes, via Total Film:
'I can say that the last parts will be the best. The others were an introduction, a way to set the table before serving the meal.' More Trending
Chaplin's Varang is a scene-stealer in the trailer, suggesting an intimidating appearance, before she is shown warning Weaver's Kiri in menacing tones: 'Your goddess has no dominion here.'
Thanks to the success of Avatar: The Way of Water, which is currently the third highest grossing film ever behind the first Avatar – having made over $2.3million at the box office – we will also get Avatar 4 and 5.
But not until December 2029 and December 2031, respectively.
Avatar: Fire and Ash releases in cinemas on December 19, 2025.
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Telegraph
5 hours ago
- Telegraph
James Cameron wants to put you in the middle of a nuclear bomb blast
'This might be the most challenging film I ever make.' So says James Cameron of his latest project, Ghosts of Hiroshima, a planned movie based on a book of the same name, which is published today to mark the 80th anniversary of the first atom bomb attack in history. The book, by Cameron's long-time friend and colleague Charles Pellegrino, draws on more than 200 interviews with survivors of both the Hiroshima blast and that in Nagasaki three days later. Cameron faces two main questions in the transition from page to screen: how best to film something that is almost unfilmably horrific, and how many people will have the appetite to go and see it? If anyone has the capacity to do justice to the first of these questions, it's Cameron. His movies combine cutting-edge technology and vast-scale spectacle like no other director, and he will need to draw on both. 'I'm going to shoot it in 3D, if need be,' he told the DiscussingFilm website. 'I want to show you what it was like. I'm going to make it as real for you as I can.' 3D is a technique on which filmmakers and audiences alike are divided, but Cameron's Avatar films are widely held up as examples of the technology done well. Avatar 3: Fire and Ash is due out in December, and Cameron hopes to film Ghosts of Hiroshima before the fourth instalment in the series is released in 2029. 'If I do my job perfectly [on Ghosts], everybody will walk out of the theatre [in horror] after the first 20 minutes,' Cameron told Rolling Stone. 'So that's not the job. The task is to tell it in a way that's heartfelt, in a way that the book does it, which engages you, and you project yourself into that person's reality for a moment.' But equally he has told Deadline: 'I'm not going to be sparing, I'm not going to be circumspect. I want to do for Hiroshima and Nagasaki what Steven Spielberg did for the Holocaust and D-Day [with Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan respectively]. He said, I'm going to make it as intense as I can make it. You've got to use everything at your cinematic disposal to show people what happened.' Cameron's interest in nuclear warfare goes back to childhood. As a boy growing up on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in the 1960s, he knew that the huge hydroelectric power plant there was a target for Soviet missiles. 'It was my first glimpse that the world was much more complex and much less safe than the little happy family nest I had grown up in.' In college, he saw a French documentary about Hiroshima. 'I remember a trolley, a burnt-out trolley, its floor filled with a pile of skulls. That image became a primal image in [1984's] The Terminator. It's actually one of the first images of the movie, and then again later in [the protagonist] Kyle Reese's memory: this idea that there's this trauma you can't escape. And then, of course, we played it all out in Terminator 2 [1991], actually showing the effects of the nuclear weapons.' That Terminator 2 scene is indelible: the heroine, Sarah Connor, dreaming of witnessing a nuclear blast at a playground before being incinerated herself. In the film, Linda Hamilton's character bursts into flame and then turns to ash, before the blast burns the tissue off her skeleton. It was so accurate that Cameron got a letter from researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, who wanted to congratulate him for 'getting it right'. All this, of course, happened for real twice in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both cities experienced the unimaginable: survivors wandering around, numb, dazed and blinded, while breathing in the vaporised remains of their neighbours; medical authorities completely overwhelmed and unable to triage correctly, not just because there were so many casualties but also because they literally didn't know what they were dealing with. The book focuses on those who survived both blasts, though they were initially not so easy to track down. 'They kept their heads down, the survivors,' Cameron has said. 'There was almost a shame associated with Japan's defeat and the abdication of the emperor, and the nuclear weapons were pivotal in that. People didn't tell for years and years afterwards that they were survivors. To be a double survivor? Well, these guys didn't put their hands up. They weren't famous in Japan. It took a lot of investigation to find them.' There was Kenshi Hirano, a newlywed in 1945 who found only fragments of his wife's bones, still warm from the blast, in the ruins of their house in Hiroshima. Feeling duty-bound to take them to her parents, he boarded a train to Nagasaki, the bones in a ceramic bowl that her parents had given them, and arrived in time to be hit by the second bomb. And there was Tsutomu Yamaguchi. 'He was in Hiroshima on work, but he lived in Nagasaki,' Cameron told Rolling Stone. 'He had blast effects, he had burns. He went back to Nagasaki to report to his work at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and he was in the process of telling his supervisor that Hiroshima was gone, vanished in a flash. The supervisor said, 'That's not possible. You're an engineer. You know that can't happen.'' Yamaguchi then turned to the other workers in the room and said, 'If you see a bright, silent flash, get down. Don't stand up to see what happened. Get down on the floor.' The people in that room survived when the second bomb hit; everyone else in the Mitsubishi plant died. Cameron and Pellegrino visited Yamaguchi in hospital in 2010, only a week or so before he died in his mid-90s – 'probably the most improbable statistic in history, having survived two nuclear blasts at close range'. Standing at his bedside, Cameron says that he and Pellegrino 'both felt that we were being challenged to accept a duty, to take a baton'. Having spent decades after the attacks keeping his story secret, Yamaguchi had begun in later life to spread the word. 'He wasn't a great orator, but his message was very simple. 'I was bombed twice by nuclear weapons and I survived. Maybe I survived for a reason, to do this. I'm able to forgive the people that dropped those bombs. And I'm able to forgive it happening to me and to my family and to my city and to my nation. If I can forgive that, you can forgive anything.'' What's going on around us, of course, brings nuclear weapons to the front and centre of our consciousness right now. The US and Israel attacked Iran in June in order to derail its progress towards becoming a nuclear power, and Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The success of Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer – seven Oscars and $975m (£732m) at the box office – reflects this fascination, though Cameron has professed himself disappointed with that movie's reluctance to focus on the victims of the bombs. 'It was a bit of a moral cop-out,' he has said. 'Because it's not like Oppenheimer didn't know the effects. There's only one brief moment where he sees some charred bodies in the audience and then the film goes on to show how it deeply moved him. But I felt that it dodged the subject. I don't know whether the studio or Chris felt that that was a third rail that they didn't want to touch, but I want to go straight at the third rail. I'm just stupid that way.' This taps into the second main question around Cameron's proposed movie: how many people will have the stomach to go and see it? Would Oppenheimer have been so successful if it had shown more of the horrors? Cameron says that Ghosts of Hiroshima will be a resolutely and deliberately apolitical film. 'I don't want to get into the politics of 'Should it have been dropped? Should they have done it?' and all the bad things Japan did to warrant it – the atrocities in the prison camps and in Nanking – or any of that kind of moralising and politicising,' he told Deadline. But a man who's directed three of the four highest-grossing movies of all time in Titanic and the two Avatar films can clearly afford a modest box-office performance, especially since he clearly sees this project's value as more than just commercial. 'It's so important right now for people to remember what these weapons do,' he explains. Cameron has always had his finger on the pulse. The Terminator franchise concerns AI overreach and sentience, Avatar is a paean to environmentalism, and Ghosts of Hiroshima confronts the nuclear question – the three areas that affect the positioning of the doomsday clock, which is now standing closer to midnight than at any time in history. But he finds hope in the détente of the 1980s. 'Ronald Reagan listened. He saw The Day After [a 1983 ABC television film depicting nuclear war between the US and the USSR] and it disturbed him. He couldn't sleep, and he put certain things into motion that actually made a difference. I think you have to reach the humanity of the people in charge.' He adds that Pellegrino signs every email to him with the word omoiyari, a Japanese principle of empathy in action. 'It's not just feeling empathetic or sympathetic. It's you must take the challenge. You must stand up. You must do something.'
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
Titanic producer reveals Matthew McConaughey's excruciating audition gaffe that cost him the part of Jack
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Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Daily Mail
Star of iconic 80s action blockbusters is unrecognizable in rare sighting... can you guess who he is?
An actor who starred in a string of iconic 1980s blockbusters was unrecognizable during a rare public sighting this week. At the peak of his fame, he was known for his collaborations with a director who went on to make two of the highest-grossing pictures of all time. In the 1990s, he acted alongside famous faces ranging from Charlie Sheen and Nicolas Cage to Angelina Jolie and Kurt Russell. He cut a distinguished figure when he surfaced in sweltering Los Angeles this Thursday - the day he celebrated his 69th birthday. The actor wore a casually stylish ensemble of a black t-shirt and matching jeans when he was glimpsed emerging from a supermarket. Can you guess who he is? He is none other than Michael Biehn, known to 1980s sci-fi fans as leading man Sgt. Kyle Reese in The Terminator and supporting character Cpl. Dwayne Hicks in Aliens. In The Terminator, Kyle Reese is a soldier in the resistance against a futuristic AI takeover, and enlists in a time-travel mission to stop Arnold Schwarzenegger's title character from murdering Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor. Aliens saw Michael cast opposite Sigourney Weaver, as members of a space crew desperately trying to survive an onslaught by malign extraterrestrials. Both movies were helmed by James Cameron, who directed Michael again in the 1989 sci-fi thriller The Abyss, featuring him alongside Ed Harris. Michael also briefly appeared as Kyle in the director's cut of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in a scene that was cut from the theatrical version. Born in Alabama in 1958, Michael landed his film debut with an uncredited bit part in the 1978 film Grease, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Three years later, he played his breakthrough part in the thriller The Fan, leading the film as murderous super-fan stalking a stage actress played by Lauren Bacall. After his sci-fi successes of the 1980s, Michael acted in the 1990s with Charlie Sheen in Navy SEALs, Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer in Tombstone, Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage in The Rock and Angelina Jolie in Mojave Moon. He cut a distinguished figure when he surfaced in sweltering Los Angeles this Thursday - the day he celebrated his 69th birthday However his career fizzled during that decade and he descended into a period of alcoholism that ended when he went on the wagon in 2008. Reflecting on his past work in a 2019 interview, he said: 'People always talk about me being an '80s star. I was not an '80s star. Bruce Willis was an '80s star. Tom Cruise was an '80s star. Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Mel Gibson. Those guys were making $20 million [a picture]. I never even got $1 million. I kind of liked it that way.' He noted: 'I have five boys and that was always important to me that I was going to be closer to them than I was to the movie business,' via The Hollywood Reporter. Michael welcomed his sons over the course of three marriages, the most recent of which is to actress Jennifer Blanc, whom he married in 2015 and is with to this day. 'The amount of movies Bruce Willis makes,' Michael said in 2019: 'I don't see how you can live a normal life where you see your kids all the time, you're taking them to school and baseball practice and you're coaching their teams. You're in their lives.' James Cameron observed: 'Maybe what held Michael back was that he didn't like playing the Hollywood game — schmoozing people and all that. For him it was all about the work. And also the path to stardom is capricious, and can turn on a single choice. Every time you take a part the road forks.' The director reflected: 'Major stardom passed him by, but that's not the point. He's done great work in many films over the years, and is well loved and respected for a few iconic characters. Who can forget Johnny Ringo in Tombstone?'
