Avatar: Way of the Water (not to be confused with Avatar: The Last Airbender) will feature a three-hour, 10-minute runtime. Director James Cameron says it’s because there’s more emotion, according to his new interview with Total Film (via Variety).
“The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis,” Cameron said. “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.”
“People say, ‘Oh my god, a family story from Disney? Just what we want,'” Cameron continued. “This isn’t that kind of family story. This is a family like Sopranos is a family story.”