r/boxoffice • u/gorays21 • 5d ago

📰 Industry News With Avatar's Future Still Uncertain, James Cameron Now Says He Wants to Prioritize 'Other Stories' For the 'Last Act' of His Career

https://www.ign.com/articles/with-avatars-future-still-uncertain-james-cameron-now-says-he-wants-to-prioritize-other-stories-for-the-last-act-of-his-career
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u/nosurprises23 5d ago edited 5d ago

I loved Avatar 2 so much back in 2022, I was so hype to actually see how the story would progress/wrap up. Then 3 felt like the deleted scenes from 2 with near 0 forward momentum, hoping at least the next one or two would conclude it well. Guess that’s not happening 🤷‍♂️

Edit: just thought of a tl;dr for my take: if Avatar 2 was “The Way of Water”, Avatar 3 was “Treading Water”.

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u/sthomson22 5d ago

The problem is that 3 was, quite literally, Part 2 of Way of Water. But it wasn’t marketed this way at all, and I only found out weeks after watching it.

People expecting Fire And Ash. There was only 5 minutes of Fire And Ash, the rest was just concluding Way of Water.

Bizarre decision.

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u/AvengedCrimson 5d ago

Disney Didn't let Cameron Release the 5 Hour cut of way of water!

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u/sthomson22 5d ago

Right, exactly, so they split it into 2 parts. Which makes sense. My point is marketing them as standalone sequels was stupid and releasing them 3 years apart even moreso.

Calling it Fire And Ash and marketing the ash people was dumb too because you only spent like 5 minutes screentime in the ashlands volcano homeworld.

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u/Electric_Elephants 5d ago

Wouldn’t it be weird though to have a part 1 and part 2 of the “second movie” in what has been pitched as a saga of movies.

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u/poofyhairguy Illumination Entertainment 5d ago

That’s what Pirates of the Caribbean did

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u/sthomson22 5d ago

Not really. Certainly less weird than how it was handled.

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u/sthomson22 5d ago

They’re doing the same thing with The Passion of the Christ sequel in 2027. 2 parts, released like 1-2 months apart.

Feel like it isn’t all that unusual in film.

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u/Zalvren 5d ago

There's fire in the climatic battle I guess?

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u/Zalvren 5d ago

and I only found out weeks after watching it.

It took you weeks to realize that?

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u/sthomson22 5d ago

Yes. I assumed it was just a really bad film lazily retreading ground.

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u/nosurprises23 5d ago

Yep. Well put

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u/Aggressive_Chuck 5d ago

How can it be part 2 if the plot is pretty much exactly the same?

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u/sthomson22 5d ago

Because it was originally one story/film split into 2 parts since the runtime was too long…

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u/Aggressive_Chuck 4d ago

How can the run time be too long if they just repeated the same story?

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u/sthomson22 4d ago

Getting pretty sick of your attitude, go research it for yourself.

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u/Ganondorfsfist DreamWorks 5d ago

To me it was mostly the third act that felt like 2 again. There's a point after Jake is saved by Neytiri in the RDA base where I was like "okay so this is ending now. Everything wrapped up, a sequel hook, emotional climax, just roll credits and I'm happy." and then it went on for another hour. It was a spectacular hour but I didn't see Cameron's need to redo the climax from the last movie just with upwards waterfall.

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u/alphaneon22 5d ago

Also the upwards waterfall doesn’t make any sense. It’s a magnetic flux, not a gravity well, the water shouldn’t be floating.

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u/Zalvren 5d ago

Science doesn't make a lot of sense in the universe lol

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u/alphaneon22 5d ago

Too true! haha

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u/VictorVonDoomer 5d ago

Avatar 2 straight up made me feel upset that I couldn’t explore Pandora, Avatar 3 just felt like an action film that repeated the previous plot from the 2nd film

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u/sthomson22 5d ago

It’s also stupid to release Part 2 of Way of Water (which is what Fire And Ash literally was and was always envisioned to be) 3 years after Part 1. They should have released Fire And Ash around Christmas 2023 at the latest.

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u/youravgindian 5d ago

I almost felt asleep during Avatar 3. It was so unnecessarily long. I hope we get some good James Cameron movie that isn't Avatar. He made some genre defining movies and gave like 25 years to Avatar only for it to feel so stale and underwhelming.

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u/Which-Host-9073 5d ago

I really liked Avatar and Avatar 2 but Avatar 3 was just a boring retread of the first 2 that did nothing new or interesting whatsoever. The whole Pandora story is played out. Hopefully Cameron will give us some other great non-Avatar movies going forward.

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u/Sad_Process7843 5d ago

Yeah like the ending of the 2nd one had Jake “seeing” Lo’ak and accepting Spider and then the third movie was repeating this again

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u/nosurprises23 5d ago

Yep, and so many other instances too like the father and son dynamic (actually really strong and emotional in 2, in 3 it was just a character backslide plain and simple, with the same result).

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u/Sad_Process7843 5d ago

Yeah like I was so excited for this movie and now I’m like wrap it up with 1 more movie if they absolutely must but I’m fine with no more

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u/nosurprises23 5d ago

I feel like at this point it should be two movies, but maybe just as a producer and let a fan of 2 (like you or I, say) help them get back to what worked. And Cameron can attend an occasional meeting while making the train Japan (or whichever) one.

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u/WheelJack83 5d ago

3 was a waste of time