In just over a month we will be able to see ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’, the long-awaited sequel to the film that comfortably leads the list of the highest-grossing films in history. However, 13 years have passed since the premiere of the first installment and until James Cameron himself is afraid that ‘Avatar 2’ could be a big flop.
The director has been honest in some statements granted to Total Film magazine, in which he has influenced that perhaps the public is no longer too interested in seeing movies on the big screen, targeting both the pandemic and the rise of streaming as great responsible for it:
The market could tell us that we’re done in three months, or we could be half-destroyed, which means, ‘Okay, let’s complete the story in the third movie, and don’t just go on and on,’ if it’s just not profitable. We are in a different world now than when I even wrote this material. It is the blow of the pandemic and streaming. Or, on the contrary, maybe we remind people what it means to go to the movies. This movie definitely does that. The question is: how many people care now?
It is not the first time that the director of ‘True Lies’ has expressed his doubts about the possibility of the sequels hitting the box office, but it is surprising that he does it again given the proximity of the premiere. By now they have surely done a thousand market studies and can get a rough idea of what the public response promises to be.
For now, Cameron came up with a surprising solution so that his great visual aspirations in terms of to the use of 3D do not cause irreparable damage to the film. In addition, everything smells more like an attempt to get the fans of ‘Avatar’ to make more noise so that its success is greater than anything else, since the filmmaker himself announced a couple of months ago the start of filming for ‘Avatar 4’ .
For my part, I can’t say that I’m dying to see ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’, but that doesn’t mean I won’t go see it -what makes me laziest is that it will be one of the longest films of the year-. Y I suspect that it will happen to many. Let’s not forget either that we have very recently the case of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, a sequel that arrived 36 years after the original and that ended up sweeping the box office and also with a luxury treatment on its arrival in domestic format.
In Espinof: