Joe Letteri was listed first among Avatar: Fire and Ash’s winners for the 2026 Oscar for Best Visual Effects. He shared the award with Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon and Daniel Barrett.
The Academy presents this Oscar to the credited visual-effects team rather than to a single performer or department. Letteri is a visual-effects supervisor and a major figure at Weta FX, the New Zealand effects company associated with the Avatar films. He previously won Oscars for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, King Kong and Avatar, making this another chapter in his long collaboration with director James Cameron’s effects-driven cinema.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is the third film in Cameron’s Avatar series and continues the story on Pandora. Its effects work combines digital characters, environments, performance capture and large-scale world-building. The film also received a 2026 nomination for Best Costume Design.
The names in this category are easy to mix up because all four are credited winners. The quiz asks for the first-listed name, not the only winner or the person responsible for every visual-effects shot.