Why It Took 13 Years to Get Avatar: The Way of Water Into Theaters

As it turned out, moviegoers were pretty darn ready to go back to Pandora.

Only 13 years after Avatar opened in theaters and sailed past Titanic to become the world's highest-grossing movie of all time, and eight years after its tentative first release date, Avatar: The Way of Water raked in $2.3 billion globally—enough for third place all-time behind only its predecessor and Avengers: Endgame.

Not surprisingly, the sequel is vying for Best Picture at the 2023 Oscars on March 12, along with Best Visual Effects (Would you like the statues gift-wrapped, team?), Best Production Design and Best Sound.

Though James Cameron was snubbed in the directing category (he's still nominated as a producer), he was as proud as any papa when his visually superior baby—achieved, just like its predecessor, using technological marvels that had to be invented or fine-tuned expressly for this production—finally opened in theaters in all its 3-D glory.

Not that he ever wanted audiences to focus purely on the spectacle. (Or the three-hour, 12-minute run time.)

"I just wish everybody would realize the last thing in the world I want to talk about is the technology," the filmmaker, who penned the screenplay for the original and then turned over 800 pages of world-expanding notes to married writing partners Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver to work on the sequels, told the South China Morning Post. "I'm a writer, I want to talk about the characters, I want to talk about the actors, I want to talk about the cast and how they interpreted those characters, and the dramatic and emotional impact that that creates."
 
In fact, he added, "I'm bored with the technology! You can't imagine anybody sitting at home and saying, 'Honey, let's go to the movies, they got some new technology!'"

Well, Cameron and returning stars Zoe Saldaña, Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver can talk about characters and the emotional aspect and the timeless relevance (the plundering of natural resources, corporate greed, the military industrial complex) all they want. But we're guessing a portion of the $2.7 billion the first Avatar made came from people who wanted, more than anything, to see just how spectacular a 3-D viewing experience could really be.

Which, under Cameron's stewardship, was very.

As with the original, the performance capture sequences for Avatar: The Way of Water were shot primarily in Los Angeles, while the special effect work was done by Peter Jackson's Wellington, New Zealand-based Wētā FX (formerly Wētā Digital). Avatar had 2,500 visual effects shots, while the sequel has a reported 3,250, worked on by a team of 1,300 artists.

In 2012, Cameron spent a reported $16 million on 2,500 acres of farmland by Lake Pounui in New Zealand's Wairarapa Valley to serve as his home base for the making of his still-planned four Avatar sequels—though at the time he was still busy writing at his Malibu home.

The reigning King of the World told E! News that year while promoting the Blu-ray release of Titanic that he was "in the very early stages" of making the as-yet untitled Avatar 2 and 3.

"We've spent the last two years building tools and software to make it a very smooth pipeline for what will be a very big and difficult project," he explained.

And he wasn't exaggerating.

"Basically, whenever you add water to any problem, it just gets 10 times harder," Cameron told Collider in 2017. "So, we've thrown a lot of horsepower, innovation, imagination, and new technology at the problem, and it's taken us about a year and a half now to work out how we're going to do it."

After 18 months of performance-capture work in L.A., which they finished in November 2019, Cameron planned to get rolling on live action filming in New Zealand in early 2020. Production was shut down that March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but resumed in June and they wrapped in September 2020.

In July, the New Zealand Film Commission said the Avatar sequels had, all told, received more than $140 million from the government's Screen Production Grant. In response to critics outraged by the idea of taxpayers funding a series of mega-movies, Film Commission Acting Chief Executive Mladen Ivancic told NewstalkZB that the productions had provided jobs, promoted tourism and otherwise injected plenty of money and intangible benefits back into the local economy.

"Productions like Avatar also shine the spotlight on New Zealand," Ivancic said, "raising the capability and experience of the New Zealand crews working on them, exposing them to leading technology and innovation from around the world."

Besides, Cameron is practically a hometown son by now.

"Good things take time, I think, and Jim understands that," Worthington told E! News' Francesca Amiker ahead of the film's Dec. 16 release, as he and Saldaña agreed, simply, that Cameron was the reason they had no qualms about committing to what's been a decade-plus-long saga. "This was his labor of love."

"But," added the Australian-raised actor, whose paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully decided at the end of Avatar that he'd rather fight for the Na'vi way of life alongside love Neytiri (Saldaña), "we didn't take the 10 years off, or the 13 years off. It was about 2013 when [Cameron] said to us, 'I know how to extend this story and extend this family, and tell a great saga."

At that time, Saldaña noted, "it had only been three years since we had released the movie."

Worthington added, "We were excited about the potential of what he was telling us."

"And here's the beautiful thing," Saldaña continued, "if there's anyone who has complete and utter respect for audiences and fans, it's James Cameron. Yes, he could've taken advantage of the momentum of Avatar 1 and whipped out a formulaic Avatar 2— and then it would have lost its purity, the essence of what made it so special. So, good things do take time. He did have to take a break and go live his life. He did more expeditions, he spent time with his family that are his ride-or-die—especially Suzy—that always have his back and are really holding down the fort."

That would be wife Suzy Cameron, née Amis, who played Rose's granddaughter in Titanic and fell for the director. Eventually.

"People always ask if it was love at first sight," she told Woman's Day in 2018. "It wasn't, but he was really cool. We're both thrill-seekers, and love scuba diving and flying planes."

And those expeditions would be Cameron's forays to the bottom of the ocean, the filmmaker a what-lies-beneath enthusiast in real life as well as in his cinematic endeavors. He and good friend Bill Paxton teamed up for an excursion to the real murky resting place of the Titanic that was chronicled in 2002's Ghosts of the Abyss, and Cameron later starred in the documentaries Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron in 2012 and Atlantis Rising in 2017. 

The 68-year-old is also one of the few people alive who's been to the Challenger Deep, a portion of the Mariana Trench that contains the deepest water on earth.

And, as it was once rumored, so it came to pass that much of the action of Avatar: The Way of Water takes place beneath the surface of the Pandoran oceans.

Cameron called his Avatar stars in 2015, Saldaña recalled to E!, to invite them to come to the studio for an update on his vision. "And that's when we learned it's not just a sequel," said the MCU star, who since the original has become a mother of three. "It's four more chapters of this beautiful saga."

Cameron told GQ that in addition to Avatar: The Way of Water he had also shot the third movie and the first part of the fourth, and had a script for the fifth (now all respectively slated for 2024, 2026 and 2028).

"All of that time he took living and catching up with his life is what inspired him," Saldaña said, "and gave him the ability to be revisited by this story—when the story was ready to be told again." She was "sobbing" as Cameron explained Neytiri's emotional journey as a wife, mother and warrior, she recalled, "and I could not wait to get back to Pandora."

Jake, meanwhile, is now "fully Na'vi in a genetically engineered body," Cameron told SCMP, and the consciousness of Colonel Miles Quaritch, who was killed in the original, has been installed in a new avatar, hence the return of Stephen Lang.

Weaver, who first worked with Cameron on 1986's Aliens, is also back for the sequels, though now as Kiri, Jake and Neytiri's adopted daughter—so she, too, had to really trust the process.

"I still had no idea that it would work as well as it does," she told ScreenRant earlier this month. As opposed to Weaver's previous character, Dr. Grace Augustine, Kiri's "really different and very gentle. And so I thought the whole thing was such an amazing experience...immersive and just dazzling."

Speaking of actors who, when Cameron points to a tank of water and says "Get in," they ask How deep?": New franchise addition Kate Winslet—playing fierce Metkayina matriarch Ronal—broke the six-minute record previously set by Tom Cruise (while making 2015's Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation) by holding her breath underwater for seven minutes and 14 seconds.

"There was just no way I was going to say no," Winslet said about signing on to work with Cameron again, 20 years after Titanic, telling ScreenRant, "When he first talked to me about playing this part, and he described Ronal, he said, 'Look, she's the matriarch, she's the female goddess warrior leader of her clan.' I mean, who writes roles like that for women? And it's not just that they're strong women, it's that these women that he conceives of in his mind are physically bionic."

And then they appear in the form of Winslet practically sprouting gills on set.

Performance-capture filming is usually all on dry land, the Oscar winner explained, calling it the "purest form of acting because you have cameras all over the studio." Shooting underwater, however, "is definitely a lot more challenging. Because of course you're holding your breath, you can't release your bubbles, otherwise it's just a bubbly old mess and the camera doesn't see anything. So it was, yeah, a lot to learn, but we were all doing it together. So yeah, it made everything feel very kind of collaborative and fun."

And no technology can replicate that.

(Originally published Dec. 16, 2022, at 5 a.m. PT)