Not everyone loves Avatar, and it looks as though detractors have been quite vocal, but director James Cameron isn’t really that bothered ahead of the upcoming release of its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water.
During an interview with Empire Magazine, the 67-year-old filmmaker said he thinks opinions change when people rewatch the original:
“The trolls will have it that nobody gives a shit and they can’t remember the characters’ names or one damn thing that happened in the movie,” he said. “Then they see the movie again and go, ‘Oh, okay, excuse me, let me just shut the f**k up right now.’ So, I’m not worried about that.”
Avatar was originally released in 2009 to huge commercial and critical success. The film made a staggering $2.84 billion at the worldwide box office, making it the highest-grossing film of all time.
It’s also an incredibly long film, clocking in at 2 hours 42 minutes… and the sequel might even surpass that. But Cameron says that audiences have to get over long runtimes. And it’s okay to use the bathroom.
“I don’t want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours,” he said. “I can almost write this part of the review. ‘The agonizingly long three-hour movie…’ It’s like, give me a f**king break. I’ve watched my kids sit and do five one-hour episodes in a row. Here’s the big social paradigm shift that has to happen: it’s okay to get up and go pee.”
Cameron revealed that Avatar 2 is “currently coming in at around three hours.”
IGN’s own review called Avatar “a landmark in motion picture history, a film that will be remembered 70 years from now as redefining the boundaries and possibilities of cinema much the way that D.W. Griffith's films did. It helps audiences take a giant step forward in their suspension of disbelief in what is ‘real’ onscreen while raising the bar for what mass appeal genre movies can be and achieve.”
Find out more about the upcoming Avatar sequels with a who’s who of the Na’vi tribe, as well as our first glimpse of the long-awaited sequel.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.