Avatar: The Way of Water: James Cameron explains why the sequel has a longer runtime than the first at 3 hours 10 minutes

Directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese from the gritty 70s school of filmmaking have tendencies to make long movies that push three hours. Tarantino also has a reputation for making long films. James Cameron, by comparison, is more of a genre filmmaker that dabbles more in sci-fi and action, but like those directors, his movies tend to run pretty long, with Avatar clocking in at 162 minutes, while Titanic ran a mighty 195 minutes. Now, it looks like his much-anticipated Avatar: The Way of Water will be sporting a runtime of 3 hours and 10 minutes, which is longer than the first movie by almost half an hour.

As told to Variety, Cameron feels the additional running time is necessary to expand on the film’s emotional content:

The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis. I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character, more on story, more on relationships, more on emotion. We didn’t spend as much time on relationship and emotion in the first film as we do in the second film, and it’s a longer film, because there’s more characters to service. There’s more story to service.”

The Way of Water extends the lore of the first by expanding the lives of Jake and Neytiri as they now have children, one of which is played by Sigourney Weaver. And Cameron wanted to showcase the growth that comes along with parenting and protecting one’s children. “People say, ‘Oh my God, a family story from Disney? Just what we want…’ This isn’t that kind of family story. This is a family story like how ‘The Sopranos’ is a family story.”

As both blockbuster films and art films alike start pushing the runtimes past the three-hour mark, with more recent examples including Blonde and the upcoming Babylon, audiences are becoming weary of having to watch such a long film at the movie theater. Cameron isn’t having any of the complaints, though, saying, “I don’t want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours. I can almost write this part of the review. ‘The agonizingly long three-hour movie…’ It’s like, give me a fucking break. I’ve watched my kids sit and do five one-hour episodes in a row. Here’s the big social paradigm shift that has to happen: it’s okay to get up and go pee.”