Hacker Cinema
Avatar: The Way of Water
2022 · Film · 192 min
Part of Avatar Collection
Directed by James Cameron
ActionAdventureScience Fiction
Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, learn the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.
2 negative8 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
Avatar is a good example.
I enjoyed each one in the theater but I tried watching Avatar: The Way of Water at home and despite having an entire media room devoted to good sound, proper lighting well calibrated projector and such it was not all that great. The movie fell a little flat without the theater experience to go with it.
I saw the limited run in advance to the 3rd one coming out in theaters again and it was good in that setting, as a reference point for my experience
How do I sqaure this circle with that the biggest films in the last two decades have been Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Avatar: Fire and Ash
2h 42m, 3 hours 12 minutes, and 3 hours 15 minutes.
All 3 are WAY too long and Way of Water in particular felt like it was 4+ hours subjectively.
Yet, they're literally the biggest films EVER by gross.
So seems the general public has longer attention spans than film students. This isn't the first time that lay people are objectively better/smarter than so-called "professionals" in a field.
The Hobbit films were shot in native 3D, and 48hz. It's a shame we can't get the high frame rate version at home, more of a shame we can't get Avatar The Way of Water at 48. The hobbit could've worked as 2 films, but 3 was stretching it too far.
It definitely isn’t a good defense.
This would be like if you were able to say some magic words to goad Google Search into giving you a copy of Avatar: The Way of Water. Even worse, the movie would be a file hosted and distributed by Google directly.
It's answering right here.
"Hello, this is Bing. I found some information about the new Avatar film for you.
There are actually two new Avatar films in the works, one based on the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender and one based on the 2009 science fiction film Avatar by James Cameron.
The animated film is set to begin production sometime in 2021 and will be released on October 10, 2025.
The science fiction film is titled Avatar: The Way of Water and is a sequel to the first Avatar film. It was released on December 16, 2022 and was a massive box office success, earning over $2.2 billion worldwide2. It stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang3. James Cameron directed and produced the film and reportedly made a minimum of $95 million off the film.
I hope this helps you."
The cost of production for the base product hasn't become irrelevant, the cost of the inductive product has become irrelevant. The cost for an AAA single player game going gold is expensive, but once done - selling the next copy costs next to nothing. Same with the budget of a movie like Way of Water - it costs hundreds of millions to make, but distribution costs are very low after that.
TV as a medium is different from the big screen. People watch sporting, talk shows and live events on TV, rarely at the movies. And the convention is for those types of things to be viewed at higher frame rates. Films can be viewed at higher frame rates but then they tend to have a TV-ified look. Which is ok, if you personally dislike the film look and prefer movies to look like daytime television. But for many people, film shot in high frame-rate, particularly in slower, less action-oriented scenes, looks too much like a broadcast experience and too little like a cinematic experience.
On a recent episode of The Filmcast, David Chen speculates that there's something of a generational divide to the preference [0]. He thinks that younger people, brought up on big screen TVs, 120 fps oled smartphones, and 240 fps gaming action, may just come to prefer high frame rate for everything, whereas older folk might be more nostalgically drawn to the traditional slow frame rate for movies.
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-700-avatar-the-way-of-water/id281400220?i=1000590350165
At my local theater in California, an adult ticket to see A Man Called Otto at 7:30 pm is $11.75 and a child is $8.50. So a family of four would be spending $40 - $50 to see the film.
Avatar: The Way of Water at 6:30 has the same pricing.
A package of candy from a local store will be $1.50 - $3. (Each.) There's no way you're getting up to $100. (You could spend more by buying food inside the theater, but you'd have to be stupid to go for that.)
'James Cameron has always been a director who harnesses the latest CGI advances to whip up thrills, but with Avatar: The Way of Water, his first film in 13 years, he faces an undeniable challenge. Can audiences still be wowed, given the constant torrent of wide-screen spectacle? And are there new delights to be discovered in the alien world of Pandora, all these years after the original Avatar?'
> People reacted kinda strongly to The Hobbit being 48fps for having a “soap opera” look, and I think nobody has really bothered to try again since then.
Ang Lee has done a couple of HFR films since, but neither was a box office success. I’ve read that Avatar: The Way of Water (which Cameron previously said would not be released in HFR) will be released in 48fps, which would AFAIK be the first big-budget HFR release since the Hobbit trilogy.