Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
- To accurately portray their role in Avatar: The Way of Water, Sam Worthington spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director James Cameron.
- Despite initial studio skepticism, Avatar: The Way of Water went on to gross over $2,334,000,000 worldwide.
Avatar: The Way of Water is a 2022 American epic science fiction film directed by James Cameron, the long-awaited sequel to his 2009 record-breaking original. Set over a decade after the events of Avatar, the film follows Jake Sully, now permanently in his Na'vi body and living with Neytiri and their children on Pandora. When the RDA corporation returns to Pandora with a resurrected Colonel Quaritch in a Na'vi avatar body, the Sully family flees their forest home and seeks refuge with the Metkayina, a reef-dwelling Na'vi clan on the coast of Pandora's vast ocean.
Avatar: The Way of Water was the product of over a decade of development, during which James Cameron and his team invented new underwater performance-capture technology that allowed actors to perform motion-capture scenes while submerged in enormous water tanks. The film's depiction of Pandora's ocean environments — bioluminescent coral reefs, intelligent whale-like creatures called Tulkun, and the water-adapted culture of the Metkayina — represented the most advanced visual effects ever created for an underwater setting. The film earned $2.32 billion worldwide, the third highest-grossing film of all time, validating Cameron's insistence that the Avatar franchise remained commercially viable after a 13-year gap.
At a runtime of over three hours, the film was deliberately paced, prioritizing immersive world-building and family dynamics over the original's more conventional adventure structure. The film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and Cameron confirmed plans for multiple additional sequels that would continue to explore Pandora's diverse ecosystems.
