Originally published at: Grab your popcorn; the next Avatar movie will be three hours long | Boing Boing
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I’ve never minded long movies. A well-made one makes the time fly by. The intermissions in David Lean pictures made things still more manageable.
What I’m really curious to see is if Cameron can pull off the feat of keeping younger people in the cinemas and in the seats for 3+ hours with this (speaking generously) franchise. The attention spans of young people are very different now than when I was a kid. For the most part they max out with one hour of episodic TV at home (often multi-tasking and time-shifting). The only longer content that seems to get them in the theatre is mega-budget action- and SFX-packed superhero movies with very familiar characters.
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But everybody remembers and loves that white guy spaceman that did stuff in that movie over a decade ago, right? Right?
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Exactly. Cameron and Disney are trying very hard to “make ‘fetch’ happen” from one movie that most Gen Xers only barely remember.
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Well, maybe they can get Kevin Costner to do it this time - that would be a fun closing of the circle
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Yeah how could anyone forget that iconic scene where he I dunno jumped off a tree or something
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Just gonna leave this here.
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With animated guest appearances from “Ferngully” characters.
Or most films by Kubrick or Lean.
Cameron is very good at technical innovation, good enough that he can succeed wildly and in the short-term on a per-picture basis. However, a franchise can’t be sustained on his approach to plot and characterisation and dialogue. The only exception in his career has been the “Terminator” franchise, where he did pay equal attention to those aspects as well as the tech.
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Nailed it
ETA: and let’s face it, it’s an Avatar movie, so Kevin Costner is probably technically 3D animated too
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Avatar was aimed at younger Millennials and the oldest Gen Z kids
There is no reason to make sequels, nobody cares, nobody of any age identifies as an “Avatar fan”
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Or this (I would be in a theatre to watch a 3 hour long Avatar movie by S.S. Rajamouli in a second!)
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Fixed that for you! He managed to make a single movie that was an improvement over the original, everything else Terminator his involvement was minor or non-existent. He had basically nothing to do with The Sarah Conner Chronicles for example, which is probably the second best Terminator property
ETA: better quote
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One thing I distinctly remember about watching Dances with Wolves in the theater was that they actually included an intermission in a nod to the limitations of the human bladder.
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There are no bathroom breaks when you submarine to the bottom of the Marianas trench, why do you think you deserve one during a movie?
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I’ll wait til it comes out in VHS.
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OK, time to dust off my 20-year-old celebrity encounter anecdote:
Circa early 2002 Bill Paxton came to my office (a small design & marketing firm in Los Angeles) with the idea of publishing a diary he wrote while exploring the wreckage of the Titanic with James Cameron. I was the designer tasked with typesetting and layout for the draft of the book he was planning to bring to potential publishers.
One day he dropped by to review the draft with me personally. He was very friendly from the start, shaking my hand and saying “Hi, I’m Bill!” Then he sat next to me at my desk to review the draft on my computer.
Very quickly the topic turned to the cramped conditions of the exploratory submarine. He said “So imagine we’re sitting like this…” (scooting right up to me so we were touching thigh-to-thigh) “…and I gotta pee in a bottle like this…” (miming the act while looking me directly in the eye).
Still one of my favorite memories of working in L.A.
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Amazing! I am so happy to have given you the opportunity to share that story! I love Bill Pullman!
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Maybe Avatar: The Way of Water is so named because you have to try not to piss yerself while watching it.
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