Avatar 2 Is Going To Be Ridiculously Long

Avatar 2 or Avatar: The Way of Water has a run time of three hours and 10 minutes long.

By Doug Norrie | Published

It’s now been more than a decade since Avatar hit the big screen and wowed audiences with one of the biggest box office showings in history. Now, we are finally getting Avatar 2 or Avatar: The Way of Water, and director James Cameron doesn’t plan on just letting this thing hit screens without keeping fans in seats for a long time.

That’s because the run-time for the movie has just been announced and it’s going to be long. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie will be three hours and 10 minutes (190 minutes) long.

While Avatar 2 will be incredibly long for a big-budget film, it isn’t all that surprising considering how some of the more-anticipated flicks in recent memory have run with this kind of thing. For starters, the original Avatar came in at 162 minutes, which was thought to be quite long at the time.

And more recently, Avengers: Endgame came in just over the three-hour mark at 181 minutes. While others in this realm have been more around the two-hour and thirty-minute mark (Spider-Man: No Way Home, Avengers: Infinity War), it makes sense that Cameron and company would want to go big or go home with their sequel.

Avatar 2 has been in various stages of production for the last decade-plus with numerous starts and stops around the script-writing and, more importantly, the filming which has been going on in some form since 2017. In all, it is reported Avatar: The Way of Water will have spent around a quarter billion dollars on its production, a budget somewhat similar to the first movie.

But that one took home more than $2.9 billion at the box office all told, and ranks as the highest lifetime-grossing movie in history. The aforementioned Endgame gave it a shot but is still trailing by more than $100 million.

With more than three hours set to come to the big screen, there is high hope Avatar 2 will have been worth the wait for audiences. The sequel will be set about 10 years after the first movie and will return audiences to Pandora, a place now facing a new set of issues around its characters and the intermixing of humans and Na’vi. 

Some of the original cast will be back for Avatar 2 including Sam Worthington as Jake Sully and Zoe Saldana as Neytiri. Also coming back will be Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang (whose death in the first will have been explained), Giovanni Ribisi, CCH Pounder, and Joel David Moore. New additions include Kate Winslet and Cliff Curtis.

Avatar 2 is due out in theaters on December 16th and is likely set to be one of the best-performing box office movies in recent memory. Considering the length between films, the budget, size and scope, we are looking at another blockbuster from James Cameron. And he’s going all-out with the movie length. It took long enough to get here, might as well have fans in seats as long as possible.