James Cameron promised an epic return to Pandora in Avatar: The Way of Water and it seems he wasn’t exaggerating as the movie’s runtime has seemingly been revealed. According to details revealed by The Hollywood Reporter, the sequel to Cameron’s 2009 movie is a bum-numbing 190 minutes long, which would make it 30 minutes longer than the original. If this runtime holds up, then it would make the movie Cameron’s second-longest movie after Titanic, which came in at 194 minutes.
While there was a time when a movie breaking the two-hour mark was a rare thing, the current list of the top 10 highest-grossing movies of all time is made up of movies over two hours long, with only Disney’s live-action The Lion King remake dipping slightly under that time. Although it doesn’t take an epic runtime to be a great movie, it certainly hasn’t done any harm to the likes of Avatar, Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Whether Cameron’s Avatar sequel will make it into the upper end of that list is something that will be seen in a couple of months, but it is almost certain to find itself a place somewhere in the Top 10.
Will Avatar 2 Be Better Than Avatar?
James Cameron has spent more than a decade bringing his first sequel to Avatar to screen, and in that time there have been many changes to the script to the point that he even completely scrapped one version. He previously revealed:
“All films work on different levels. The first is surface, which is character, problem and resolution. The second is thematic. What is the movie trying to say? But ‘Avatar’ also works on a third level, the subconscious. I wrote an entire script for the sequel, read it and realized that it did not get to level three. Boom. Start over. That took a year.”
Avatar: The Way of Water may be arriving 13 years after the release of Avatar, but the original movie casts a long shadow, and Cameron has admitted that the sequel is under a lot of pressure as a follow-up to the highest grossing movie of all time. Cameron commented:
"Yeah, it's a big play. It's a big bet. And we won't know where we are until the second or third weekend. The success of the first film — we had a pretty good opening at $75 million. But openings are dwarfing that by factors of two or even three these days. Even if we have a stellar opening, we won't really know where we are for a couple weeks because it was the return visits on the first one. It was people wanting to go share. If we get that again, we'll probably be on solid ground."
Avatar: The Way of Water had a hefty budget of around $250 million, and the film will have to go some way if it is to make back that budget as well as its equally huge marketing budget. That said the movie is almost guaranteed to cross the $1 billion mark at the end of the year, and that would be more than enough to allow Cameron to continue his Avatar story in its future sequels. Avatar: The Way of Water is released on December 16.