Source: Courtesy / 20th Century Studios
The “Avatar” sequel will be three hours and 10 minutes long, which is a half hour longer than the original. With people’s attention spans worsening, critics fear this new run-time is far too long. The film’s director James Cameron explained why it’s so much longer this time around. Read more inside.
The long-awaited film “Avatar: The Way of Water” comes 13 years after the first groundbreaking movie hit theaters in 2009. Cameron told Total Film magazine that the sequel runs so much longer because they spent more time focusing on “relationship and focus” compared to his first film.
“The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis,” Cameron told the publication. “I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character, more on story, more on relationships, more on emotion. 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.”
Protagonists Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) will return in the sequel, and the two characters also now have children (one of which is played by Sigourney Weaver) that are also main characters.
“People say, ‘Oh my God, a family story from Disney? Just what we want…’ This isn’t that kind of family story,” Cameron added. “This is a family story like how ‘The Sopranos’ is a family story.”
Cameron already addressed the naysayers in an interview with Empire magazine over the summer, confirming the upcoming film was “currently coming in at around three hours.” He also warned fans that he was not interested in hearing their complaints.
“I don’t want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours,” Cameron said. “I can almost write this part of the review. ‘The agonizingly long three-hour movie…’ It’s like, give me a f*cking break. I’ve watched my kids sit and do five one-hour episodes in a row. Here’s the big social paradigm shift that has to happen: it’s okay to get up and go pee.”
Just as Cameron imagined, fans are sharing their disdain for the longer movie on social media. While others are excited about a longer run time and requesting even more from Cameron.
Here’s what some fans are saying:
https://twitter.com/tef1ondon/status/1588301359115538432?s=20&t=hVFN5Vj4eGd0hFLMJvYxXA
“Avatar: The Way of Water” debuts in theaters nationwide Dec. 16.
