‘Avatar: Fire And Ash’ Oscar Nominated VFX Team

James Cameron’s blockbuster sequel Avatar: Fire and Ash earned Oscar nominations for Deborah L. Scott for Best Costume Design, and a Best Visual Effects nod for the team led by Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon, and Daniel Barrett. I sat down for an extended interview with Eric and Daniel to talk about all things Avatar, in this first part of a three-part interview.

Avatar: Fire And Ash By The Numbers

Besides the Oscar attention, Avatar: Fire and Ash is also currently the third-biggest film of 2025 with $1.3 billion and counting at the global box office. A powerful winter storm tearing across North America is suppressing turnout, but the film is still on track to top $1.4 billion and make a run at a $1.5 billion finish.

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If that sounds “low” for an Avatar film, consider this sequel is the longest of the series and has played less time per day per screen as a result, and it had a shorter launch ahead of the holiday season last year. Those two factors have probably accounted for around $100 million of potentially lost revenue, to offer a general best-guesstimate.

But a bigger factor has been the enormous one-two punch of animated films Ne Zha 2 and Zootopia 2, especially in Asia-Pacific markets where both films are doing record-shattering business and pulling many families away from Avatar: Fire and Ash. Zootopia 2 in particular is overperforming in a big way (and for lots of good reasons). I’d put the impact at as much as $200 million in lost potential additional revenue (including those coveted repeat viewers among families).

There’s no way to know for sure, but I suspect those three combined factors cost Avatar: Fire and Ash a sizable chunk of change. And a final big factor is that this is the darkest, scariest, and most grown-up of the Avatar films, so it was competing in a marketplace that has dramatically shifted toward heavily favoring child-centric family films at the top of the box office charts.

Forbes‘Avatar: Fire And Ash’ Tops $1 Billion In Worldwide Box OfficeBy Mark Hughes

All told, then, I think if Avatar: Fire and Ash had opened without the animated competition from Ne Zha 2 and Zootopia 2, if it were the same runtime as The Way of Water, and if it were a bit less somber and opened up more for younger kids, it could’ve hit $2 billion. That’s a personal guess, but running the numbers I think it’s a fair estimate.

As I’ve said before, though, a $1.4-1.5 billion outcome is still a fantastic result proving the franchise is among the most popular and successful in cinema history, playing at it’s “worst-case” as a top-tier Marvel sequel. If that’s what an underperformance looks like for this series, then it’s definitely got nothing to worry about in the long run.

Avatar: Fire and Ash – The Interview

And now, without further ado, here is the first part of my extended interview with Eric Saindon and Dan Barrett about the spectacular Oscar-nominated visual effects work of Avatar: Fire and Ash…

MARK HUGHES: Congratulations on another mind-blowing leap forward in the work that you’re doing, I feel psychic in predicting Oscars in your future.

ERIC SAINDON: Oh, we don’t like the talking that one [laughing].

MH: I don’t want a jinx it. But when I was watching this film and thinking about you having made two films at the same time, I was reminded when I spoke with film editor Myron Kerstein, who worked on Wicked and Wicked: For Good simultaneously. Because the songs were recorded live in camera, they record multiple times and had to edit it all together seamlessly… Can you talk about what that was like with these films?

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ES: Well, it’s interesting though, right? Because the thing we do a little bit different is, Jim [Cameron] shoots everything with performance capture. He shoots both films with performance capture, and builds the two movies with just performance capture as the outline for the whole movie, let’s say.

Then, that sort of guides us along the way. So we’re not just shooting in the dark, not even from a script, we have a visual representation of what the two movies are going to be. It might be a little long at the beginning, I think the first edit of film two was like four and a half hours or some crazy stuff. So it’s a little long…

But the thing we have to make sure we get early on is, all the live action– especially for Jack Champion. Because he was a 12 year old when he started, and then a 16 year old when we started filming, and over 18 when we finished filming, he changed dramatically over those years. I mean, it’s a time when boys change a lot. He went from a little kid to a man.

But still had to look the same, it was a process to make sure we got everything, and tried to get everything in sort of an order that made sense. So if he did change a little bit and he got extra hair where he didn’t have it before, and things like that, you accounted for it with the timeline of the movie… It’s the weird thing that, like, our makeup artist Sarah Robano had to do. She had to make sure that everything stayed looking the same as when we started, from when he was 16 to when he was 18.

So, it was a long process of getting all those things to work.

But because we had that visual representation from Jim, we knew what we needed to fill in. So I think our task was probably a little bit easier than probably Wicked in that case.

MH: I noticed that the 3D in this film is used very differently than it was used in the first film, for example. I went back and I was rewatching the movies, and I noticed that this time, the 3D seems heavily committed to giving the weight and the sense that everything in the shot exists physically in the space, that when we’re seeing the front of the character, the back of them is there in the scene too, like the 360 sort of impression.

So it’s that case of– it’s not even just going deep into the camera, which can make the characters look like cutouts. This created, in those close-ups, the amount of detail and physical weight and texture. How did that conversation go, and does that affect how you approach the visual effects themselves?

ES: A lot of that’s based on Jim’s ability to shoot stereo films, right? Like, no one shoots a stereo film like James. He’s been doing it for so long, he understands it better than anyone else.

And he knows that your eye line, when you watch something in stereo, if something’s [in the foreground], in the next shot you want your subject of the shot to be that distance again.

You want to ease your eye from one place to another, so that your eye is not jumping around, because that’s when you sort of lose that depth, if your eye is trying to focus one depth to another depth to another, it all sort of flattens out on you.

Because Jim is really good at guiding your eye, and the dilation of your eye and the focus, your eyes can adjust and they can absorb a lot more of the stereo and understand the scenes a lot better because of that.

DANIEL BARRETT: Yeah, it’s a nice compliment to hear for Jim, you know? This is his third time through, he’s gotten really good at it. The realism and immersion is what he’s looking for.

You know, he’s not [just after] sort of like bells and whistles, right? !here he’s trying to frighten the audience by throwing things at them. He wants the audience to be in the scene. And so it’s lovely to hear you say that, because that’s what he’s looking for.

ES: Well, it makes things a lot harder for us, obviously, right? And more so for Dan than for me because of contact points. I mean, Spider’s in a lot of scenes in this movie, he’s in a lot of shots. So there’s a lot of contact between Spider and the Navi, and the Recoms [Recombinants, soldiers in Avatar bodies] and Quaritch and things like that.

So there’s lots of intersections, there’s lots of contact points. There’s lots of things that have to be thought about in ways that a lot of movies [don’t]– like the 1st movie, there was one shot that there was a contact between a live action character and a CG character, and that was Neytiri holding Jake at the very end, right? And that was it.

There was there was very, very little other contact. But in this movie, it’s every scene. There’s someone touching Spider, or someone touching another live matching character. It’s a real pain in the ass, to be honest, but it’s what sets you into the shots.

DB: Yeah, much more challenging. Because in a 2D production, what we’ll do is we’ll take Spider and we’ll take a Spider puppet, and we’ll match-move that so the animators have something to work off.

And then a 2D show, as long as you’re reasonably good in Z, you know, your X and Y is nice, then you can put a hand on Spider, and you can fix it and comp a little bit. Drop a shadow, you know, make it feel like it’s connecting. It’ll be fine.

But there’s just nowhere to hide when you’re doing a stereo show like that. And to the extent that, even though our digital double puppet was really accurate for the animators, we would even go to the extent of taking that digital puppet, baking it – the deformation would be pretty good, but if they weren’t perfect – and it’d be analyzing it from all these angles and just modeling it to perfectly match the outer surface of Jack Champion, so that when we put that hand on there, it was on Spider’s shoulder. Because it gets given up very quickly, once you put on 3D glasses.

MH: [O]bviously it’s been from 2009 to 2025, but the difference– even the last film, which was obviously fantastic and came out recently, I can feel the difference between the effect of that 3D [in The Way of Water]. and in this new film.

It’s the best instance of “look at me, you can tell I’m a 360 degree person,” and everything feels that way, so that in your mind’s eye you stop thinking about it as effects.

You stop thinking about it… [And] it’s a good thing that you stop thinking of every shot in the first two movie was like, “Whoa!” and that last one with the water, you’re watching it even in the theater and like, “Oh, please rewind it back, I need to see that again!”

But in this film, the 3D… just hit perfectly. And as you said, it’s a lot more work. Can you talk about, in terms of the animation itself, are you like “We’ve got to put pores, and now we’ve got to put fingerprints,” because you’re going to see it?

DB: Well, I think in terms of that stuff, I guess we’ve always, you know, been there and tried to be as good as we can be. In terms of animation, one of the things that I mentioned before in 2D, you can hide a little bit, right? Which is very different from stereo.

For the animators, I’ve always considered it to be a really positive thing, because one trap that animators can kind of sometimes get stuck in is that they don’t look around.

So they’re animating an Ikran, and they might not look at it from the side. They may spend their entire life working on that shot, just looking through the camera it’s going to be rendered through. And as a supervisor, sometimes I’ll see things and I’ll go, “There’s something not right. I can’t tell you what it is. Show me this from the side.” And they’ll do a little clip of it from the side, and you’ll immediately see what’s up, right?

It’s like, well, it doesn’t work from the side. I know it was only slightly wrong from the from the shot camera. But if you fix that, it’s gonna look great.

So it’s a really good discipline for the animators, I think, to always be looking for any angle. And I think what that does in terms of animation is, it just makes it so much stronger, just by default. You know, that extra work of looking at it from every angle improves the shot, it improves the animation every time.

ES: I think a lot of what you’re seeing in this new film, and the step up that you’re talking about, is that our whole team, including Jim and the sound guys and editing and everyone, we worked on two movies in a row. So everyone sort of became much more of an expert.

Because usually by the end of a movie, you get really good at a certain character, a certain type of animation, or type of painting or detail on cloth or any number of things. And because we have been working on these films for six years now, we have a lot of experts at all the different Na’vi, like Pandoran culture or animation of the Na’vi, how to animate their tails in a great way, or their ears, or the subtleties of their their faces.

And it showed itself in like Varang, because Varamg is a brand new character. And out of the box, she came out out outstanding. I mean, a lot of that goes to Oona Chaplin, but a lot of it also goes to the really talented animation team that really understands these characters. She just sort of popped into place in a way that I don’t know if anyone was expecting it to work quite as easily as it did, including Jim. So I think a lot of that comes from the expertise of doing it so many times in a row now.

DB: I think when you spend three years making a process as second nature as you can possibly ever hope it to be, then when you come into it again, when that stuff is not a concern and when you know you can get to a certain level with the knowledge you have, it just gives you that time.

So yeah, it’s not even so much about ability. It’s that time to start looking deeper. It’s like, okay, we’ve got all that stuff sorted, here’s some things that may have bugged us or here’s some detail we may be missing in the past. Let’s think about that now.

So, yeah, it’s a rare experience to be able to do this on films like this. And I think it does, you know, pay dividends. Not just in what’s seen up on the screen, but also the experience for the team and how much sort of more smoothly it went, because we knew so much about how to do it.

Thanks to Eric Saindon and Daniel Barrett for speaking with about the magic they worked on Avatar: Fire and Ash. Be sure to check back this weekend for part 2 of the interview, and part 3 next week.