Be ready for an extended soak.
James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water has a runtime befitting of the 13-year look ahead to the sequel, round three hours and 10 minutes, sources inform The Hollywood Reporter.
Avatar 2 hopes to affix an elite membership of longer Hollywood tentpoles which have completed blockbuster enterprise in theaters, together with Avengers: Endgame (three hours and a pair of minutes) and Cameron’s Titanic (three hours and 14 minutes). The two movies rank No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, on Comscore’s record of the top-grossing motion pictures of all time on the worldwide field workplace, not adjusted for inflation.
Cameron’s unique Avatar, launched in December 2009, stays No. 1 all these years later. That movie was some 29 minutes shorter than the sequel, or two hours and 41 minutes.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, motion pictures have gotten longer, with many Hollywood occasion pics working over two hours and half-hour, which, by conventional requirements, is taken into account prolonged. (One exception was Sony’s field workplace sensation Spider-Man: No Way Home, which got here in just below the wire at two hours and 28 minutes.)
This pattern will proceed all through the remainder of the yr. December tentpole Babylon, from Paramount and filmmaker Damien Chazelle, runs a minimum of three hours, insiders inform THR. And Marvel and Disney’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which opens Nov. 11, is 2 hours and 41 minutes. Matt Reeves’ The Batman, launched earlier this yr, ran two hours and 55 minutes.
A film’s working time contains credit, which may take up as a lot as 10 minutes.
twentieth Century and Disney, residence of The Way of Water, haven’t but launched an official runtime for the sequel, however the film’s size started leaking out as soon as it obtained an official score. (In the U.S., the film is rated PG-13.) Some theaters inadvertently listed the working time on their web sites when posting the score.
Disney, which inherited the Avatar franchise when shopping for up twentieth Century Fox, declined remark.
In early September, Cameron beamed in from New Zealand on the D23 to showcase half a dozen scenes from The Way of the Water, which the filmmaker additionally produced alongside his longtime Lightstorm companion Jon Landau. Stars Zoe Saldaña, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang had been in particular person on the conference. Much of the footage confirmed off Cameron’s immersive underwater work.
Not lengthy after D23, Disney and twentieth Century issued a remastered model of the primary Avatar as a way to prime audiences for the sequel. The rerelease grossed a formidable $76 million-plus on the international field workplace, bringing the movie’s present gross to greater than $2.92 billion.
Way of the Water as soon as once more facilities on Worthington’s Sully and Saldaña’s Na’vi character Neytiri. It picks up a decade after the unique and follows their household, with further stars, together with franchise newcomers Vin Diesel and Kate Winslet.
Avatar: The Way of Water opens in North America Dec. 16, timed to its international rollout.
