The director has said he will make three more ‘Avatar’ sequels. But is more already becoming less?
Unless you want to bury your head in an underwater sand dune, it’s clear that “Avatar: The Way of Water” underperformed at the box office this weekend — a fact that shouldn’t change anyone’s experience of the movie. The critics, or at least a whole lot of them, were rapturous (though not this one; I thought “The Way of Water” had the same blend of wowza visuals and just-okay story that made the first “Avatar” a movie I enjoyed but was never remotely tempted to visit again). And audiences, who gave the film a Cinemascore grade of A, may sustain and build with the coming weeks.
If “The Way of Water,” like “Avatar” before it, is indeed a precedent-setting, eyeball-tickling movie whose images are the popping embodiment of a story that’s good enough to sweep you along, one might well ask: Who cares if it took in $150 to $175 million at the domestic box office (as it was expected to) or the far softer $134 million it did? Why lose yourself in bean counting when James Cameron is reinventing the future of movies?
But is he? Let’s not fool ourselves: The bean counting has always been a driving dimension of the “Avatar” brand. It’s been the measure of Cameron’s ambition for it — that this was going to be a franchise that transcended all others, that lived in in its own heightened realm, that had the kind of mythological hold on audiences that George Lucas did after the first three “Star Wars” movies.
The popularity of “Avatar” was always going to be integral to all that. After the original film, when Cameron laid out his master plan to make four sequels to it, my honest thought was, “Has he lost his mind?” Not because I thought the plan was commercially unfeasible, but because I couldn’t wrap my own mind around why the director of “Titanic” — a timeless and awesome film, because it was one of the most moving experiences in the history of popular cinema — could be saying, with the power to do anything he wanted, “I’d like to spend the next 20 years making ‘Avatar’ films.
