Filmmaker James Cameron is returning to take the audience back to his world of Pandora with the sequel of 'Avatar' titled 'Avatar The Way of Water'. The first part of the movie was the highest-grossing film of all time and the sequel comes 13 years after the original which grossed $2.9 billion worldwide.
James Cameron says he is relieved. "We’ve been sitting on this egg for a long time and getting it out in front of people, the response has been overwhelmingly good so far,” Cameron tells Reuters in an interview.
Set more than a decade after the original where Pandora’s blue Na’vi people battled human colonists for the moon’s natural resources, The Way of Water revisits protagonists Jake Sully and Neytiri, now parents of five children.
Asked if he was concerned the 13-year gap might hurt interest, James Cameron said: “That was a very legitimate concern, I didn’t feel that instinctively but it was always a possibility. Then we dropped our first teaser trailer in May and it had 148 million views in 24 hours. I’m not worried about it anymore.”
“What does worry me is that the market has contracted due to the double punch of streaming and the pandemic, it’s slowly coming back…so can we be profitable in a changed market? … We’ll know in a few weeks, I guess.”
The sequel that will release on December 14 will be Kate Winslet, who plays the Metkayina clan’s shamanic matriarch.
Kate Winslet, who has worked with James Cameron in 'Titanic', performed her underwater stunts herself and learnt to hold her breath for around seven minutes as she prepared for the role.
“With Titanic, when you’re flooding sets…you just never knew if there was going to be a chair sliding past your face or someone was going to get bumped by a table or a floating cushion. With Avatar…everything is completely planned. The safety has to obviously be in place because you are performing underwater 20 feet down and you have to be very respectful and calm so that everything works in a clockwork manner," she says.
Avatar The Way of Water brings back Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver from the first film
