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James Cameron tried to make Avatar 2 shorter but couldn’t

Avatar 2 is a long movie, a very long movie, but it turns out James Cameron did everythign he could to make The Way of Water shorter

James Cameron tried to make Avatar 2 shorter

Avatar 2 is a very long film. How long is Avatar 2? Well, it’s long enough that we had to write an article explaining when you should go pee while watching Avatar 2. It turns out, though, that James Cameron tried to make his science fiction movie shorter but literally couldn’t.

“I think there was a lot of tension around length,” Cameron told EW. “And because it’s a complicated linear narrative, which is the worst scenario for trying to shorten, you’ve got a complex story servicing a lot of characters, and it’s like dominos falling.”

“This has to happen for that to happen, he continued. “You’re not following a bunch of parallel plot lines in a way that you could take a lot out.” Cameron explained that during editing, he really struggled to chop out the things that “didn’t advance the plot”, especially when he found them scary or beautiful this resulted in him taking things out then putting them back in.

Not to be rude about Avatar 2 because we really enjoyed the action movie (check out our Avatar 2 review if you don’t believe us), but it seems to us that the obvious bits to chop out would be all the stuff with the Sully’s earning the Way of Water.

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Listen, we love seeing the Na’vi fall into the ocean as much as the next person but let’s be honest. There are only so many times you can see someone fail to ide a fish before it starts to wear a bit thin.

If you want to learn more about The Way of Water, check out our guide to the Avatar 2 cast, or you may be interested in discovering what happened to Jake Sully’s human body. Finally, we’ve written everything you need to know about the Avatar 3 release date.