Avatar: The Way of Water is shaping up to be a very long movie. Ahead of its release, James Cameron explained why that is, saying it's a creative choice that allows the audience to spend more time with the characters and their emotional arcs.
Avatar: The Way of Water has been in the works for 13 years now. Since Avatar was released in 2009, the film has amassed nearly $3 billion at the box office, but that doesn't mean it's not without its detractors. It's been a commonly repeated criticism of the film that its characters were not particularly impactful and that their arcs did not feel very deep. When it was announced that the current Avatar: The Way of Water runtime was sitting at over 3 hours long, that made many people wonder what the film would be about, and why it was so long.
In the new issue of Total Film magazine, Cameron explained that The Way of Water was longer because Avatar did not spend as much time on emotional arcs. “The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis. I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character, more on story, more on relationships, more on emotion," Cameron said. "We didn’t spend as much time on relationship and emotion in the first film as we do in the second film, and it’s a longer film, because there’s more characters to service. There’s more story to service.”
He also acknowledged that the film would be more of a family story, but also said, “This is a family story like how ‘The Sopranos’ is a family story.” When the film's runtime was announced over the summer, Cameron was quick to say he didn't want to hear whining about the Avatar: The Way of Water runtime. The director explained that he felt the complaints about a movie's length were overblown, particularly in the era of streaming and binge-watching. On that, Cameron said that society has one "big social paradigm shift that has to happen: it’s okay to get up and go pee.”
A common criticism of the first film was that its story was not quite as deep as it could have been. In that vein, many have said that any Avatar sequels need more compelling stories. It seems that Cameron's insistence on focusing more on emotion and family may just provide a more compelling story for audiences to latch on to.
There are certainly already some interesting plotlines shaping up, with Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) now parents to a brood of children. Avatar: The Way of Water can succeed with a fresh story, and it looks like that's what this film promises. A sci-fi story about a family of aliens being displaced by the advancing colonization of the human race sounds like it can provide fodder for many more stories to come.
Avatar: The Way of Water is out in theaters on December 16, 2022.
Source: Total Film via Variety