‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ and ‘Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ Head to Vision Pro in 3D

By
Ben Lang
-
10

Vision Pro is steadily becoming the premier destination for 3D theatrical releases to reach home audiences. The latest 3D movies headed to Vision Pro include The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) and Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025).

The News

Apple has confirmed two new 3D movies headed to Vision Pro. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) is available to buy or rent in 3D as of this week, through the Apple TV app.

Image courtesy Nintendo

That will be followed by the top-grossing movie of 2025, Avatar: Fire and Ash, which will be available starting on June 24th, streaming in 3D on the Disney+ app.

That’s it… that’s the news.

My Take

Vision Pro is the best way to watch 3D versions of major movies today, thanks to a combination of high-quality OLED displays and ease-of-access to high-quality 3D content. 3D movies on Vision Pro are generally streamed in 4K with HDR and surround sound, and you can make the screen literally as large as it would be in an actual movie theater. From my personal experience, if a movie in Vision Pro is available in 3D, there’s no reason not to watch the 3D version; it’s a pure value-add to the experience.

This follows the collapse of the 3DTV market years ago, which led to a near-elimination of movies being released in 3D for at-home viewing. Vision Pro is offering a second life to the 3D releases at home. And while the number of 3D movies available on the headset is continuing to grow, the high cost of Vision Pro makes it anything but certain that releases will continue in the long term.

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Avatar: Fire and Ash, in particular, is a major win for 3D movies on the headset; Vision Pro is now the only way to experience the movie with the 3D perspective that director James Cameron originally intended it to be seen.

Granted, the release calls into question the partnership between Cameron’s Lightstorm Vision studio and Meta, which was announced at the end of 2024, a year before the release of Avatar: Fire and Ash.

At the time the studio and Meta said they were partnering to “scale the creation of world-class 3D entertainment experiences spanning live sports and concerts, feature films, and TV series featuring big-name IP on Meta Quest—which will be Lightstorm Vision’s exclusive MR hardware platform.”

While it wasn’t ever confirmed that the partnership would include a 3D release of Avatar: Fire and Ash on Meta’s headsets, the release of an exclusive 3D clip on Quest—to promote the movie’s release—certainly teased as much. But at this point it’s unclear if the movie will be released in 3D on Quest like on Vision Pro. We reached out to Meta about this but the company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Paul Bellino

    Another total Fuck Up By META. We needed this Premiere on the Quest Headset. I totally give up on them as a Company.

  • Paul Bellino

    Steam Frame can not come out fast Enough.

  • Bram

    Most likely, at the time this collaboration with Meta was made, they were already aiming for releasing it with Meta's future headset 'project phoenix', which will have a higher resolution and oled blacks and was sceduled back then, to come out this year, but was later delayed. James Cameron at the time already hinted at that, probarly was sampled the prototype of project phoenix, and has always been clear about wanting to bring his movie to an audience on a viewing standard that meets his personal vision and requirements of how it should be watched. Vision Pro is already there, project phoenix has been delayed.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      TL;DR: this was most likely never about headsets, but about who was willing to pay Cameron for the 3D versions.

      In late 2024, when the cooperation with Cameron was announced, Meta was still following a strategy of throwing lots of money at XR, including support for game studios and other content. It is quite unlikely that Meta cut off pretty much all financial support for VR game development, which is what the vast majority of their user base is interested in, but kept paying for 3D movie content aimed at a not yet released HMD that will sell in very small numbers compared to Quest due to a much higher price.

      In contrast to Meta, Apple keeps throwing lots of money at 3D content for XR HMDs as part of their long term strategy, despite the currently tiny audience of maybe 500K AVP users. This includes paying directors for creating Immersive video, certainly not cheap contracts to stream Lakers games to AVP, and a still running ten year deal to develop new media forms with a soccer league. They were willing to pay even more to partner with the NBA, but the NBA wasn't willing to commit blindly for several years to a new type of media that nobody had yet seen.

      So it seems much more likely that Meta backed out of the deal with Cameron when they significantly reduced their XR engagement earlier this years, and Cameron went and took Apple's money instead.

      • Dragon Marble

        I don't think this says anything about his partnership with Meta. Both you and Ben are reading too much into this. Avatar is always going to be coming to Disney+, and it's always going to have 3D. It's Avatar!

        You really thought the third one was going to be the only 2D Avatar movie on Disney+ because Cameron was dumb enough to make it exclusive to Quest? If Cameron offered Meta some exclusive deals, this movie was not one of them.

  • SFMike

    Now Apple needs to get the rights to the terrific Jaws 3D conversion. And Disney's Jungle Cruise.

  • Mike

    Disney Plus in 3D is still unavailable in Germany and the Apple TV store doesn’t have a lot of 3D movies to buy (not even Avatar movies are listed as 3D there).

    Watching 3D movies was one of the only longer term use cases for the Vision Pro; it’s looking really bleak here.

  • Why isn't Meta securing these stereoscopic 3D movies. I still can't officially watch even the first The Super Mario Bros. Movie in my Quest 3 in stereoscopic 3D, which is utterly absurd. VR is perfect for this kind of stuff.

  • FrankB

    Yeah sure, release it on the platform with the least amount of users. Only millionaires, idiots and you tube content creators have a Vision Pro.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Out of curiosity, I asked the Google AI how many millionaires (in USD) there are in the world. It answered "approximately 58 to 60 million", so about twice as many as Quest have been sold, and roughly four times the number of active VR users across all platforms. It's doubtful that even 1% of these actually bought an AVP, but apparently a device only catering to millionaires could still do a lot better than Meta did in XR.

      Apparently there are also 114M YouTube channels/YouTubers, and I'm not even going to ask how many idiots there are in the world. But these three groups combined provide a lot of market potential, and they have a lot more money to spend than the teen dominated Quest user base that has shifted more towards free to play social VR games.