James Cameron isn’t having any of this whining that his Avatar sequel will be too long.
Avatar: The Way of Water, the sequel to the 2009 original, is coming out in mid-December. The filmmaker told Empire magazine that the movie is currently about three hours long, though edits could change that length.
But if three hours seems awfully long to sit in a theater, especially with a jumbo-sized Coke, deal with it.
“I don’t want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours,” Cameron told Empire in an article published Tuesday. “I can almost write this part of the review. ‘The agonizingly long three-hour movie…’ It’s like, give me a fucking 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.”
The first Avatar movie ran two hours and 42 minutes. A third film in the series is scheduled for 2024, though its length hasn’t been released yet.
Cameron also got a dig in at a meme that’s been going around claiming the Avatar characters are forgettable. It says, “In ‘Avatar,’ the main characters, Renuni and Janino, are so forgettable that you just believed that those were their names.”
Sure seems as if Cameron had that meme on his mind when he told Empire, “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. Then they see the movie again and go, ‘Oh, okay, excuse me, let me just shut the fuck up right now.’ So I’m not worried about that.”
To set the record straight: Sam Worthington’s character is Jake Sully, while Zoe Saldana plays Neytiri.
