There were more obvious things to get excited about during Disney’s presentation to the movie theater industry at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Wednesday. There’s sure things like Lightyear, next week’s Marvel effort Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, even a huge, star-studded David O. Russell movie to earmark for the next Oscar season.
But in terms of good, old-fashioned hype, nothing seemed to beat the first footage from Avatar: The Way of Water—the now officially titled, officially actually existing sequel to Avatar, a.k.a. the biggest movie of 2009 and, for a while there, the biggest movie of all time. Appearing on video from New Zealand where he’s deep in post-production, director James Cameron promised that he had “set out to test the limits of what cinema can do” and reaffirmed his commitment to showing the film in digital 3D, a format he pioneered with the original film’s release 13 years ago.
What did they actually show in the footage? Reports from inside the room say it was dazzling, and almost entirely free of dialogue. But more important, we can all find out for ourselves next week, when the teaser plays exclusively in front of the new Doctor Strange movie before debuting online the week after. The version you see in your local multiplex, however, may not be what you wind up seeing when the new Avatar opens in December. On Tuesday, the president of the National Association of Theater Owners, John Fithian, vowed that The Way of Water will have more versions than anything in movie history: “We are talking about high resolution, high frame rates, 3D, IMAX, PLF, different sound systems and in 160 different languages.”
For those of us who were around for the first round of Avatar hype, there’s something wonderfully familiar happening here: a room full of people getting exclusive early access to footage that blew them away, a sense of skepticism slowly being eroded by speculation that this time Cameron has the goods. But here’s the thing, the one rule to remember: James Cameron always has the goods.
This is the man who has made three movies that were each, at the time, among the most expensive movies ever made; all three became megahits. This is the man who weathered the extensive prerelease skepticism over Titanic with a tactic he compared to “the martial art of aikido, where you use the opponent’s own momentum against them to take them down.” This is the man who has made far more than enough money to spend the rest of his life doing submarine expeditions; instead, he made another movie, and says there are two more on the way after this one. This is a man, in other words, who has earned our attention.
It’s not hard to justify skepticism around Avatar: The Way of Water. It’s been too long since the original movie came out, there aren’t enough true Avatar fans, the movie industry has changed a ton since 2009. But there was plenty of skepticism around the original Avatar, so much that it was built into the hype. In August of that year, Fox held something called “Avatar Day,” where it showed extensive footage that sold the movie far more thoroughly than a trailer could. I was there; I swear this really happened. “It was smart of Cameron to embark on this long-range wooing project, reeling in audiences bit by bit until we’re completely on board with giant blue cat people,” I wrote at the time. And we really were on board, even if it’s become too easy since then to pretend we weren’t.
From the reports on the ground, the mood at CinemaCon this week is buoyant, with a very real sense that people are returning to theaters after two brutal years. Promising spectacle far beyond anything you can see at home, Cameron really could not have picked a better moment to return.
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April 28, 2022 at 03:40AM
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It’s Time to Stop Pretending We’re Not Excited For a New Avatar - Vanity Fair
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