Zoe Saldaña has quietly done something no other actor in Hollywood history has managed, and this time, the numbers back it up.
Thanks to the continued box office dominance of James Cameron’s Avatar franchise, Saldaña has officially surpassed Scarlett Johansson to become the highest-grossing movie star of all time. According to industry tracking outlet The Numbers, Saldaña’s cumulative global box office total now sits at approximately $16.8 billion, edging past Johansson’s $16.4 billion haul.
The decisive push came from Avatar: Fire and Ash, the latest chapter in Cameron’s sci-fi saga, which crossed $1.23 billion worldwide earlier this week. That single release was enough to reshuffle the top of Hollywood’s all-time earnings leaderboard.
What makes the achievement especially remarkable is how concentrated Saldaña’s résumé is at the very top of cinema history. She remains the only actor ever to appear in the three highest-grossing films of all time:
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Avatar
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Avengers: Endgame
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Avatar: The Way of Water
Between Pandora and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Saldaña has been a constant presence in the modern blockbuster era, also anchoring Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy as Gamora. While Johansson’s box office rise was largely driven by her decade-long run as Natasha Romanoff in the MCU, Saldaña’s dominance spans multiple mega-franchises operating at peak theatrical scale.
Interestingly, the upper tier of the all-time box office chart is now almost entirely populated by Marvel veterans, with Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Pratt also ranking among the top earners, a reflection of how franchise filmmaking has reshaped Hollywood economics over the last 15 years.
Yet despite her unmatched commercial success, Saldaña has been candid about the creative trade-offs that come with working at this level. In past interviews, she’s acknowledged that as franchises grow larger and more industrial, the space for artistic input often shrinks, especially for actors who don’t have producing authority or creative control.
In other words, while Saldaña now sits at the very top of the box office mountain, the climb hasn’t been without compromise.
Still, history doesn’t care about qualifiers. By sheer theatrical impact alone, Zoe Saldaña now stands alone, the most bankable movie star the global box office has ever seen. 🎬
While some of Zoe Saldaña's popularity and box office contributions may have come from outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it is no less an impressive feat, moreso from a member of the Marvel family nonetheless.
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