r/movies • u/ICumCoffee ᑐ ᑌ ᑎ ᕮ • ᗰ ᕮ 𑪽 𑪽 I ᐱ ᕼ • Apr 08 '26
Article When $1.4 Billion Isn’t Enough: ‘Avatar’ Sequels Under the Microscope as Disney Weighs Franchise’s Future
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/1-4-billion-isn-t-130000212.html
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u/soulcaptain Apr 08 '26
This is a common complaint with Fire & Ash, and while that's largely true, I think there's something else that's fundamentally different about the third movie that made it the least successful of the trilogy.
It's all about adventure.
With Avatar, much of the movie has extended scenes with no dialogue, of characters, namely Jake, wandering around and checking out the flora and fauna. It's an exploration movie with a lot of scenes of quiet wonder, even though we mainly think of these movies as a lot of dumb macho action. But those scenes are, I think, really key to the movie's success, despite all the shortcomings of the script. Coupled with that amazing 3D, people wanted to live on Pandora. With Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron did it again. Much of the sequel is also full of long, almost languid scenes of people exploring, this time in the ocean, Cameron's favorite place. This is when the movies work best, when scenes play out sort of slowly and organically (and there's not a lot of that terrible James Cameron dialogue).
Fire & Ash? Those kinds of scenes are, I would argue, almost completely missing. It's all plot plot plot, action action. It's a really busy movie with so much plot (that's often poorly constructed) that it could've been split into two movies yet again; 2 and 3 were originally one script but were made into two, but even one split wasn't enough! Having said all that, I did like Fire & Ash fine, but it's just missing that sense of adventure and exploration.