James Cameron Says Next ‘Avatar’ Film Will Be The Longest One Yet; Last One Moved “Like A Bullet Train” Instead Of Taking Time For Character Development
Filmmaker James Cameron, whose third Avatar installment is due out in December, says the film will be the longest in the franchise so far in terms of running time.
Cameron, who also made the three-hour-plus Titanic, has never been accused of going short in recent years. His previous Avatar film, 2022’s The Way of Water, clocked in at 3 hours 12 minutes.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is slated to be released by Disney on December 19. Cameron shared his outlook for it in an interview with UK-based film outlet Empire.
“In a nutshell, we had too many great ideas packed into act one of Movie 2,” Cameron said. The Way of Water, in retrospect, “was moving like a bullet train, and we weren’t drilling down enough on character. So I said, ‘Guys, we’ve got to split it.’ […] Movie 3 will actually be a little bit longer than Movie 2.”
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The first Avatar film in 2009 had a running time of 2 hours 42 minutes.
Despite their heft, the first two Avatars have combined to gross more than $5.2 billion at the global box office. The original outing won three Oscars but was unable to repeat Titanic‘s feat of winning Best Picture en route to becoming (for a while, anyway) the top-grossing film of all time. After its 2022 re-release ahead of The Way of Water, the original Avatar reclaimed the title of No. 1 all-time release, with more than $2.9 billion in global ticket sales.
Because longer films generally earn fewer commercial showtimes, they tend to be regarded warily in many corners of the industry. Cameron, though, has more than proven his ability to draw huge crowds in spite of (or maybe because of) the epic duration of his recent work. As the Oscar-winning run of The Brutalist also recently showed, the length of movies remains a perennial subject of fascination among media and moviegoers alike.
Cameron, though, has limited patience for the obsession. In 2022, he said during promotion for the second Avatar film that he can’t stand “anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [episodic series] for eight hours.”