Avatar: The Way of Water Runtime is Ridiculously Long
If you though the first one was pretty long, wait until you see the sequel.
It seems that Avatar director James Cameron will take as much time as he needs in order to tell a story in his upcoming sequel, titled The Way of Water.
According to Gamesradar, the movie will be over three hours in length, marking a whopping 3 hours 10 minutes. And there is a good reason for that, Cameron insisted when speaking to the outlet, as the director seems eager to address the emotional aspect of the story, and not just turn Avatar 2 into a marvelous show.
"The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis," Cameron told Gamesradar. "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."
The first movie had to weather the accusations of resorting to much to special effects and paying less attention to the story and character development. Looks like Cameron listened to the critics, as he says that The Way of Water is going to be a family story, "like how The Sopranos is a family story."
Naturally, the decision to go for three full hours of runtime does not add The Way of Water onto the list of the world's longest films in history, it is rather long compared to the movies that usually hit theaters.
It is not even Cameron's own record: for instance, the 1997 hit movie Titanic is still four minutes longer. For Cameron fans, the news is not even surprising.
"I'm just imagining the studio execs overseeing Avatar: The Way of Water trying to casually ask Cameron to bring the runtime down from 3 hours and 10 minutes to which he says nothing and points to the box office numbers of the previous film and I can't help but smile. A king." – @theYokoHiguchi
While a lot of people still complained about the Avatar sequel being too long, others reminded that it is only 10 minutes longer than The Batman which came out 8 months ago.
Avatar: The Way of Water hits theaters on December 16.